Questions on Lumina rear end (w/ reference pics)

[Grand Moff Joseph]

In light of the recent rash of suspension changes, sagging rear ends and noisy shocks, I decided to give my car's suspension a quick check. Below are a couple of pics of the rear end. Does anything look broken/almost broken/weird in any way? Also, the long horizontal bar that is crossing the pic, is that the rear sway bar everyone keeps changing from 31mm to 34mm?

 

[mfewtrail]

Everything looks pretty normal to me. Looks like your bushings are starting to go bad a bit(on the trailing arms and the leaf spring isolator pads/bushings might be getting old too, can't tell all that great from the pic..they're still pretty "meaty" anyways, so unless you have some squeaks/creaks from the spring, they're fine). The bar running end to end is in fact the anti-sway bar, but it's either 10mm or 14mm in size stock(DOHC cars got the 14mm ones, if you have the FE1 suspension, it should be 10mm). The replacement for it is the Addco 22mm rear bar(read about it first on the board if you're interested, a lot of people have issues with them, there was a thread were they were trying to get addco to resolve those issues though). Another thing you could look at are the control arms(straight in front of the sway bar, there are four under the rear end, two in front of the leaf spring, two behind). Make sure the control arms are straight and you might want to take a look at the bushings in those as well.

 

GM Performance Parts has some nice trailing arms you could upgrade to(they're listed for 2nd Gen W-bodies, but will work fine on 1st Gens) if you want to upgrade rather than buy stock ones(the GMPP ones are probably cheaper than the stock ones anyways).

[veritasz34]

Well it looks pretty much like the underside of mine...BTW I was looking into changeing the trailing arms on my Z (Or just adding better/newer busings)..By any chance would you have a part number for the GM upgrade trailing arms??It would probably make sense to get those already done from them...

[mfewtrail]

Well it looks pretty much like the underside of mine...BTW I was looking into changeing the trailing arms on my Z (Or just adding better/newer busings)..By any chance would you have a part number for the GM upgrade trailing arms??It would probably make sense to get those already done from them...

 

Part # 12498649 http://www.gmpartsdirect.com $32.37(includes both trailing arms).

[veritasz34]

Thank You sir...I'm glad you all here help out the newbies....