Junk yard or rebuild? The rear of the Radio Flyer (red 2004 wagon) is real wonky. Tracks straight , but over bumps, the rear feels disconnected to the front. Best way I can describe it is if you've ever ridden a pressed steel frame motorcycle over rough grooved surfaces. The forks twist left while your butt twists right. Lets assume that the subframe isn't tearing out and the bushings are shot.
What years interchange with the rear? I've heard 2000-2011. Is this true? I might be able to find a wrecked late model with out a ton of miles on it and swap it out complete.
Option 2: Replace the bushings myself. Would urethane be a bad choice? Anyone make a decently priced kit just for the rear?
Option 3: E-bay rear suspension kit. It will be Chinese. Will it kill me?
I have a friend with the same year and model. It has a noisy rear end as well. The first thing was we replaced the rear shocks. One was very bad and that fixed quite a bit. The front bushings on the trailing arms usually go first and replacing them will help. They can be changed while on the car but it will take some work and a fabricated press to push/pull the old ones out. That's something we plan on doing this spring.
Swapping a while rear subframe will work but when I asked about cross over of parts I was told station wagon only.
The suspension parts are not wagon only, just the subframe.
I mention the front bushings and doing them on the car, I say that since removing the lower arm requires removing quite of few bolts that may very well be rusted and on a 15 year old car driven in Chicago winters well lets just say I don't think many of them will come out without just snapping bolt heads off.
Your description says the rear toe is out. Focus has eccentric toe adjusters, right? It's not a twist beam...or is it?
Multilink rear. Never though it might be a bad alignment.
Wagon Focus has a different rear suspension from all other Focus. All hatch and sedan are the same 2000-2011.
Wagon is different so only the wagon years.
Just the springs and shocks. They are longer with a different mounting (eyelet.) I could be wrong. There is a massive amount of partial and conflicting information out there.
Appleseed said:
Multilink rear. Never though it might be a bad alignment.
They are badly aligned from the factory, and if it somehow creates a bit more toe in, they are diabolical on a road with variable traction.
I had a Neon that gave me fits trying to get it to steer nice.
I played with strings and levels and tape measures for quite some time.
I was unable to eradicate the evil
Finally gave up and took it to the alignment shop.
15 min later it steered like a dream
From what I'm seeing, an alignment is in the near future. If anything, I hope I can have then give the rear a once over and see if any bushings are failing and rebuild/replace from there.
