Any tips? I dread having to do mine.
The bushing splitter chisel is designed for just this task. It cuts a strip out, and folds the edges of the cut inwards. It is truly a piece of cake. With mine I got about half way through and the bushing came out in one piece. I was scared-er than you, Jokila, on that you may rely. I have no more fear...LOL
cheers,
Douglas
Yeah that tool would have been really handy. I ended up notching the bushing with a small body saw, then used the ole "hand chisel" and hammer to split the bushings. A couple more whacks after that it was out.
For a first timer, I personally didn't want having to fight doing it underneath the car because I hate rolling around on the ground for 1, and second, I knew I wanted room to work. It was also a good time to flush my brake fluid. So I just pulled the entire beam from the car when I did it. It may be a couple extra steps yes, but I would just time it with a brake bleed. I know I would have gotten really riled up if the first time I had to do it was under the car. If I have to do it again though. I'd likely just drop the beam though since when I installed the new bushings, lots of grease
Having it out was nice to assess what was going on and being able to take full swings at that old bushing to fully split it. As well, I purchased the notorious ebay/amazon kit that's supposed to work with the Cupra-R bushings, but if I recall correctly, during installation, one of the cups in that kit wasn't deep enough to fully receive the bushing, so I ended up having to use a cup from my wheel bearing kit to receive the last bit of it. I recall you could get it in about 90% of the way with the kit though.
Make sure that you have a set of axle beam bolts too, some people have to cut one of them out because of the direction it was installed interfering with the fuel tank I believe. Mine didn't have an issue coming out (Golf) but I had them on hand just in case, because they are tty bolts.