23mm Sway Bar Parts
I just installed a set of graphite impregnated polyurethane bushings on my 02 Jetta and thought I would share my findings since it took me a while to find urethane bushings for the 23mm sway bar.
The bushings are made by Energy Suspension part # 15.5106.G (
http://www.energysuspension.com/pages/volks_wc.html)
and were purchased from Suspension Restoration (
http://www.suspension.com).
Cost was $32 for parts and $5 for priority postal shipping (I received it in 2 days from CA to NY).
This kit is great for those of us with the 23mm sway bar. The kit contains sway bar bushings and end link bushings for both the old and new style of end links. Also included are long bolt and washers for re-installing the sway bar bushings.
The sway bar bushings were easy (as per the how-to), but the end links were a bit of a pain. I used the long bolts provided to get the sway bar bushing seated and then removed them and reinstalled the original bolts (a bit anal, I know....). I have the newer style of end link and found that I had to pound the old bushings out by setting the end link ontop of a large socket and hammered on the bushing with a smaller socket (used as a drift) ontop. Slicing the bushing flare ontop off with a razor blade helped a little. As for putting the new end link bushing in, I found I could do it with very large slip-joint pliers, but clamping it in a bench vise was much easier (the bench vise probably would have made removing them easier too, hind-sight being 20/20). Total time spent on this job (including rotating tires and adjusting tire pressure) was about 1 1/2 hours, taking my sweet time.
My car has 122k miles (35k since I bought it last year), and the front end has had a squeak for the last couple thousand miles. I replaced the front strut mounts and rear shocks last week - they were definitely wore-out, but it made no significant change in ride or squeaking. After installing this kit I was amazed at the change in the handling of the car. It now feels like it's riding on rails. This really tightened up the front end of my car, especially on hard cornering.