Anybody know how to replace all four control arms?

 

Lavaman, most of the arms are pretty self evident (atleast to me). The upper arm and the lower/forward one on the rear suspension has 2 bolts (1 on each end) and once the bolts are removed, the arm will literally fall out of the car on its own. Installing a new one is about as simple as removing it.

As for the lower control arms for the front and rear, these are a bit more involved. In short, you have to have the end of the car off of the ground (ie, both rear wheels or both front wheels in the air) so you don't put any stress on the sway bar. From there, you will need to undo some bolts on the top of the wheel in question with a jack under the spindle so you can release any tension in the spring in a controlled manner. Once you get the spring unloaded, a few more bolts where the arm attaches to the frame and the arm is off. If you do some looking around on the forums, there are a lot of write ups on how to do this.

 

I've been told that the rear control arm bushes may wear so quickly that it's a yearly job to replace them. Not sure about that myself, but when mine went, I bought polyurethane bushes and had them fitted to the original control arms. They should last nearly as long as the rest of the car.

Thus, if yours have gone bad (didn't you say a mechanic inspected the car before you bought it?), you might want to consider those as the OEM bushes themselves aren't sold separately, and it doesn't make any sense to me to replace a perfectly good control arm because of worn rubber bits at the ends.

 

Please share where you purchased these polyurethane bushings. Are these specifically for X-type rear control arms or a generic bushing that happens to fit (or can be modified to fit) the X-type control arms.

 

They were from this guy (hangs around at the UK forum). Not sure whether you can find similar bushes cheaper in the US, though.