[Jazzbass]

Your choices really depend on which bushings you are talking about. You have four major bushing areas in your suspension:

- A-arm
- Front strut tower top
- Spring plate
- trailing arm

For the A-arm bushings, your choices are OEM rubber ($400), poly bronze ($250) or poly-carbonite ($40). OEM rubber will get you back to stock, but the busihings have to be vulcanized on the a-arms - a process that you can't do yourself and is not cheap. Smart Racing will do it for you, and I think they charge $400 for both sides. Poly bronze are expensive, but supposedly due to their much lower friction surface (steel on bronze), the actually ride smoother than the poly-carbonite. Do a search on Pelican, there have been lots of debates (even one with me & Chuck arguing with free-body diagrams). The theory is the poly-bronze have a lower coefficient of static friction, and its this friction that results a harsh ride. The polycarbonite are cheap, but have to be fit perfectly to not squeek - at least according to the guys I've talked to locally. Esitmates are about 4-5 hours worth of time just to fit them properly. I decided that I'd rather spend $200 more than deal with fitting the poly-carbonite bushings.

For the strut tower tops, I'm staying with whats in my car. You can get monoballs and other aftermaket units that will give you more neg camber, but this tends (IME) to be more of a racing type upgrade more than a "they just wore out" kind of thing.

For the spring plates, your choices are poly-bronze and Neatrix. I went with Neatrix since they don't have the fitment issues of the poly-carbonite and many local guys run them with no complaints. The poly-bronze are nice, but didn't seem worth the money like they did for the a-arms.

For the trailing arms, the only solution I've seen that seems like it really works for a street car is OEM rubber. From what I've read (I've decided not to do these on my car just now), the trailing arm bushings need to let the trailing arm move in two planes, not just one like the other bushings. Because of this, monoballs (which give only one plane of movement) tend to give a harsh ride. There are polybroze bushings here that will move in 2 planes, but they are open to the environment and there are questions as to how long the grease would last there. But thinking about it, the other poly bronze bushings are also open to the environment and no one complains about them, so it may not be a big deal.

This is all the stuff I've learned in my suspenion re-do project. There is ton of good (and some bad) info on Pelican - if your serious, you can spend a couple hours reading through archive posts.