bump stops
these puppies are really important. the health of your c.v. joints depends on them. if they get bent or damaged in a way that lets your spring plates droop down further than normal, the only thing that will stop the downward movement is your drivelines. with all this stress on the drivelines the c.v. bolts can come loose and the c.v.s can break. Not Good!
here's the test...with your baja just sitting there, get under it and grab a driveline. wiggle it back and forth, you should be able to do this because the c.v.s are designed for in and out movement. if your driveline won't move in and out then the c.v.s are at and angle that is greater than it should be and your lower bump stops aren't working right. this is also they way to check the tightness of your c.v. bolts (you do check those don't you????)
so, maybe one side is ok and one is bad, that's how mine was. i know why the one side went bad, it was because my diagonal arm pivot bolt came out and the bushing got messed up. you can fix your bump stop by building up the surface the spring plate sits on with weld or by welding on a piece of 1/8" of 3/16" plate or something. you need to raise the surface the spring plate sits on so the diagonal arm doesn't droop down so far and stress the c.v. joints. keep buliding up the surface untill the driveline will slide freely between the c.v.s. you might think that this lowers ground clearence but there are limits with stock type 1 (bug) c.v. joints. if you have type 2 (bus) c.v.s then you can actually modify the spring plates by notching them so they do droop down further for more ground clearence. bus c.v.s are good things.
if you don't have a spare c.v. you will be quite stranded when one breaks. i had a spare when one of mine broke done in mex. i was very far away from civilization.
pivot bolt/bushing
these are the irs' weak link aside from the cv joints. if you have never had a problem with these things then your not running hard enough. it's like this, the pivot bolt works loose and falls out. this has happened to me twice now, both times in Baja. you may not notice when it happens, if you've had your diagonal arms off you know there's a little nub that the bushing can still pivot on if the bolt isn't there. but things can get worked loose and the arm can come all loose and start banging around in that housing thingy and make all kinds of racket. then you will start fuming because you can't drive really fast anymore and you REALLY need some alcohol.
ummmm. yeah. got a little off topic. ahhh who cares. what was i talking about? oh yeah, tack weld your pivot bolt in place so it won't go anywhere!!! but if you need to take off your diagonal arms you might have touble breaking the tack so think about it before you do it.
if your driving around without a pivot bolt the pivot bushing can get all screwed up, the metal sleeves in particular. in Baja last winter i ended up having to remove half of the bushing just to get it all back together. running with half a bushing was better than nothing but it still made some noise.
i finally worked it some more last week, i was able to get both bushing halves to work but still couldn't get both metal sleeves to work. i'm also still missing those two metal washers but used a rubber piece to take care of that. so now i have no noises coming from the right rear corner. everything's working like it should. joy.
