well, after thinking for a while that i had a wheel out of balance, i discovered that my idler arm wiggled very slightly in its housing. hoping that it was the source of the rough riding feeling i had i nmy front end (and fixing it because it needed it anyhow) i chose to rebuild it. <P>i requested the parts (bushing and and a seal) by the part numbers given on the off-road.com and outdoorwire.com writeups on this maintenance job. [my compliments to the writers by the way, i found them to be very helpful] but i have a word of warning for anyone planning to do this maintenance job... my dealership seems to have given me the wrong bushings with the correct part numbers, or th eprob may be that my 88 (Nov 87 production date) idler arm is different than the ones rebuilt for the articles. the new bushings were WAY too large (inside diameter) for the arm... they were even much larger (roughly 1 mm) than the worn out bushings i was replacing! because my hometown dealer (i bought the parts 150 miles away during the week where i go to school) couldn't get new ones for 2 days, i swapped the old ones, putting the hardly worn top one one the bottom and the heavily worn bottom one onto the top. it has improved the steering feel some, but it is definitely not back to how it should be. <P>tomorrow i will discuss my probem with my local (college town) dealer and see what they think. if they have smaller, thicker bushings, i will simply rebuild it again, but this time it should be much easier. I followed chris Geiger's atricle almost to the T, including greasing the cap for easier removal to rebuild on the vehicle next time, but the one thing i did different was to not remove the arm from the other steering componants, and i simple removed the housing to clean it up. this allowed me to avoid what seemed like the emost difficult step of removing the arm tie-rod-end-like link from the other parts.

Gene, be sure to let us know what P/N your bushings are, I can add that to the article here.<P>Glad you found the article useful, and you are forgiven for confusing who wrote what. [img]images/icons/tongue.gif" border="0[/img]

Different years use different bushings.<P>Drew Persson might know all the specifics since he was making different idler arm braces and brass bushings, etc...?

litle_joe, oops, sorry about that mistaken quote... i'll make a mention of how well the greased cap works for future rebuilds when i replace the old bushings with new ones.<P>hmm, so i guess this means that the idler arm shafts for later 4Runners were thicker than the earlier ones?<P>another note you might put on the article with the part #s is that the job can be done without removing the arm from the steering linkage... as i mentioned, i did it that way, and didn't see any probs with doing it that way... it was convenient to avoid having to use a pickle fork.<P>later.gene.

little joe,<P>i picked up the new bushings for the idler arm on my '88. they are part # 90385-18068.<P>thanks.gene.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helv, Helvetica, Sans">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Mean__Gene:<BR><STRONG>little joe,<P>i picked up the new bushings for the idler arm on my '88. they are part # 90385-18068.<P>thanks.gene.</STRONG><HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>Cool, thanks for the update Gene. I'll add this to the article.