The stock end links on my car were originally rubber. After 120,000 miles you could hardly tell that by looking at them. They were severely dry rotted and I felt that I was loosing some handling here.

The people that I asked for help on this was Mazdatrix. I talked to a salesperson on the phone and we talked about what I use the car for and why I wanted to replace them. Since this car is a daily driver he recommended one of the polyurethane bushing sets that they offer. I agreed and had them sent to me. I also had him send the sway bar bushings too because those were also rubber and looking pretty bad.

The kits that came were manufactured by suspension techniques. In the kit were all the bushings to replace the existing rubber ones.

 RESULTS

I had some trouble installing these bushings and they definitely did not fit like the stock ones did. I saw this when I started putting them on, but since I already destroyed the old rubber to make way for the new bushings I had to continue on… I followed the instructions that came with the kit, and everything was tight and assembled correctly, but the final result was the car rolling back and forth like it was on the ocean!

It was time to go back to the drawing board on this one. While I was browsing the Mazdatrix site I also saw the solid piece end links that have "Aircraft Style" eyelets instead of using rubber or poly. Unfortunately they wanted something like $120 bucks for the set! Luckily though I subscribe to the Summit Auto parts catalog and I found the parts to build my own in there for about $30!

So I built my own end links without using any of the poly bushings that I got from Mazdatrix. This was pretty simple to do. Here is a picture of what they are supposed to look like. (From the Mazdatrix site)