Locating New Hardware

I had to go in to work early today and was off by 1:00PM, just in time to have lunch with Troy. We talked about some of the hardware I am going to need to replace, such as the rear sway bar mounts and the bolts for the A-arms.

I had done a little looking online for the rear sway bar mounts only to find them extremely overpriced, at least in my opinion. The stock ones were nothing more than a glorified U-bolt style muffler clamp with a mounting plate on the bottom. Troy made some calls and located a pair at Exhaust Pros that were the right size. I ran and picked them up and also grabbed my sway bar bushings so I could see what modifications we would need to make, if any.

As you can see in the picture below the clamp is about half the width of the busing, which means we will need to fabricate a mounting plate for the bottom. I took both parts to Farm Power Manufacturing to have two plates made to those specifications. Once we have the plates we will weld them to the bottom half of the clamp and we will have made new sway bar mounts for far less than any of the aftermarket ones.

After dropping the parts off, I went to Mac's to see about the A-arm bolts. They had exactly what I needed.

And now after a long day, I am going to spend the rest of the evening relaxing with my wife.