Window Weld front lower control arm bushings

[BreckAConner]

Will Window Weld by 3M work on the front lower control arm as a bushing?

[Fleetw00d]

What the heck is that top photo? Are you really burning the rubber out of it in the fireplace?

OEM bushing are less than $20 each from Majestic - do you really want to trust your life to window weld and an arm that's been heated to who knows what temperature?

For $40, I'll ship you a pair of lower control arms from a 93 EX coupe; it had 181,000 miles on it, the bushings still appear to be in pretty good shape.

[illinois_erik]

holy crap batman. no.
you can get poly bushings for cheap too and you wont even need a press to install them. since you burned out the oem bushings now just cut a slit in the old bushings ring thats left behind and pop/pry it out
I wouldnt trust that control arm now that youve messed with the tempering of it, the ends might just snap off.

The window weld is shit, even when filling motor mounts. if youre dead set on rigging things, liquid nails would be a better polyurthane to fill with. it wont last long either way.

[BreckAConner]

Alrighty, I'll probably just buy a new pair. As for the fire place, they are gas logs and I'm not sure how hot they got.

[johnl]

I wouldnt trust that control arm now that youve messed with the tempering of it, the ends might just snap off.

I'd be very surprised if the control arm is heat treated in any way. It will most probably just be a robust forging made from a good quality steel. It's far cheaper to make a forging a bit larger and un-heat treated than smaller and heat treated. In any case, a larger dimensioned forging will be less flexible than a smaller dimensioned forging, regardless of heat treatment (heat treatment has no affect on the degree of flexure for a given loading, though it will increase the amount of flexure needed to permanently deform the forging and may increase it's fatigue life).

It's good practice to make the forging large enough in dimension to resist significant flexure, which will make it robust enough to resist permanent deformation. I've seen racing cars with bits and boobs welded to such forgings with no issues. I've seen them reshaped by heating them red hot and bending, similarly with no issues.

The most common exception to this might be smaller dimensioned steering arms, typically the kind you can unbolt and remove. These are commonly heat treated to raise their resistance to fatigue failure, but it seems this kind of steering arm is much less common on modern cars, replaced with larger dimensioned arms that are incorporated into the suspension 'upright' as part of the forging.