I helped a friend replace the trailing arm bushings in his '82 300TD the other day. The car has 460,000 miles on it, and sounds like the rear end is going to fall off at every bump. A couple weeks ago he came and got a set of trailing arms from one of my parts cars, and cleaned and painted them. He brought them back a few days later, and made an appointment to come back so I could help him. On his way here, I thought that somehow the arms might be different and called him. Neither him or I thought about the fact that they might be different on a TD until he was half way here on the 100 mile trip. I made a query here on DD that morning:
Quick wagon (TD) question for you early birds (Thursday morning) and found out they are the same (my parts car was a sedan). Thankfully they are the same, so we were able to use the arms that were rebuilt (new bushings and painted). Since the arms came from a car with less than 200,000 miles on them, he decided not to change the bearings. We got the old arms off:
The old and new arms (one side at least):
The bushing was rattling around the sleeve it was so worn out:
The arm ready to go in with all new parking brake shoes and hardware:
Both arms installed ready to lift up and install the sub-frame:
The finished product:
It drives very smooth and quiet (suspension wise) now!