Yeah so my truck has been making a rattling noise when going over bumps from the passenger front wheel tried to crawl under it to figure it out and noticed the upper ball joint seal was split and alot of grease leaked out. After replacing this guessing it was making this noise it didn't fix it. So while shaking the front of my truck trying to recreate the noise with my friend under it looking he noticed the bushings to my swaybar link kit holding it to the lower control arm were shot so $10 later and 2 mins to replace it still had the noise.

Shook the truck again after this and he noticed my shock absorber was missing the lower bushing. After spending about $100 on the ball joint the special socket you need to take it out and put it in and the link kit I'm highley pissed.

Just need to know what size bushing i need for this because advance auto isn't any help after they took my pay check for the week.

It's the lower bushing by the way. No idea if this makes a difference.

Thanks for any imput.

 

You can't buy the bushing just for the shocks. Just replace them. $10 or so for the minimum ones.

 

Alright so i replaced the shock that had the missing bushing. Managed to do it without having to compress and remove the coil spring. Glad i did this anyway because the shock i took out was doing absolutley nothing. You can compress it all the way by hand and it doesn't decompress itself back to normal. Going to do the other one on the front tomorrow (ran out of day light). Just from the one replaced my front end feels alot better, no more crazy bouncing going over speed bumps. Going to do the rear shocks later this week after i get paid again.

Will try and get new front tires and do an alignment in the next month. Front tires are already worn on the outside figure that I can get atleast another 5k miles out of them but doing all of this I think I'll just change them soon as possible.

 

Unless they're gas shocks, they're not supposed to extend back out by themselves. Of course, that doesn't mean they're not worn out...

 

ummm. managed? HUH?

I have NEVER had to remove a spring to replace a SHOCK. on vehicles with STRUTS? yeah> every single one but you gotta pull the strut out with the spring attached to it, to change them.
and to "compress" a spring to replace a shock I would do one of 2 things; depending on how/where the shock mounts; if it goes thru the spring unbolt the top (or snap it off) jack up pull the bottom bolts replace shock bolt the bottom in, set truck down on ground, (notice I never said nothin about removing tires) and put the top hardware on, done.
If the shock mounts on the back of the control arm (like the older Chevy trucks and vans) then I would just jack directly under the control arm, gets you space to work AND compresses the spring so you can connect both ends.

 

Well this being the first time I've delt with any suspension work i had no idea. I seen a vid or wo where they had to compress the coil spring before taking separating the control arm from the steering knuckle and had to remove it out to get the shock out. My bad lol. just a 19 yr old kid working on his own truck to save money and I enjoy every minute of it.

At any rate i got the job done and the truck is riding great.

 

Not sure what kind of shocks these first gens come with stock on the 2wd. But the shock i removed was shot to hell.

 

Congratulations daksn! Glad to see younger folks doing your own work, gives me hope! Hang in there man, you can do it!