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  1. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    Good info, thanks! $15 was the right price this go-round, but yours probably rides better. :-)
  2. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    Suspension rebuild a success! Car drives nice and straight and tight, better than when it was new. It's just taking a couple of tries to get the steering wheel right where I'd like it. There is some undesirable jiggling and noise from the rear that I attribute to having gotten the cheapest...
  3. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    Finally got all of the new rear suspension parts installed minus the trailing arm bushings; going to move to the front hopefully today. From videos, it looks like the forward inner mount on the front LCAs has non-captured nuts up inside the subframe, so that will be interesting. Had the...
  4. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    Wow, your car has a lot of miles! Mine's just over 90k, but it does see mostly town miles, and that on fairly nasty roads. I now have on the shelf: Inner and outer tie rod ends Front lower control arms Rear lateral links Rear swaybar endlinks Second rear LCA for the other side because...
  5. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    New tires are on! The MZ3 iSport-original Bridgestone Ecopias fought me coming off, though it may be more the fact that the OE steel wheels have such a pronounced ridge in the bead seat area. One of the new tires gave me a little bit of grief to seat, also. I ended up leaving the standard...
  6. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    Today I received most of another RockAuto order full of yet more suspension/steering junk - minus of course the bits I think I most particularly need, which are coming tomorrow. Probably won't actually work on it tomorrow, anyway. Once I'm done with this pile of stuff, there should be no more...
  7. 1

    Anyone attempt wheel installation/balancing/alignment themselves?

    Today I finally attempted a rear toe check since I was 99% sure my thrust angle was off after a LCA replacement on the Mazda IRS (and the act of removing/replacing the LCA educated me on how to actually adjust rear toe using the stock cam bolts!). I used pretty much the method described in...
  8. 1

    Wheel off center after changing LCAS

    This. Even without a test drive (which they apparently skipped), you'd think they'd have scratched their heads upon noticing that LF and RF toe were off by equal amounts in opposite directions ...
  9. 1

    Anyone attempt wheel installation/balancing/alignment themselves?

    Thread resurrection! A friend from another forum posted this when I said I didn't believe he could change a tire without a machine: Fat @$$ changes a tyre Shortly after, I made my own lever type bead breaker (a bumper jack also works if you have one, plus of course something to hold it down)...
  10. 1

    Wheel off center after changing LCAS

    Sure, you can adjust the toe at home. If the car is newer, the endlinks might not even fight you much (when I last adjusted mine, I used an 18" pipe wrench). On FWD cars, the info I've seen is to go for 0 degrees total toe, and then you'll have to play with it to get the steering wheel centered...
  11. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    Yay, rear suspension is back together. For now. And the clunk is finally gone. I thought all those control arms would never line up! If anyone needs to care (and I hope you don't), the outer rearward rear LCA bolt and the lower shock mount bolt are the same. Hardware store replacement is...
  12. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    That looks nice! Might even feel better than the original leather cover on the T and GT models.
  13. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    Rear, actually. Went out and bought a ratcheting breaker bar (my old C-H impact wrench was doing no good, maybe because of a low rate of blows per minute, and using a regular breaker bar was proving completely miserable) to finish removing the LCA to trailing arm bolt. Which broke, so I had to...
  14. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    Ever try to buy a brake caliper rebuild kit? I asked a parts guy about it once since I'd always bought rebuilt calipers but the old shop manuals show how to do it yourself. He rolled his eyes slightly and looked it up, and we found that the kit (with piston sold separately IIRC) was actually...
  15. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    Ah hah, outer LCA bushing appears to be toast. That could well be making my clunk sound! Looks like the LCA is sold complete, and it's hard to get the bushings separately. Pretty good prices on RockAuto, though.
  16. 1

    What have you done to your Mazda5 today?

    Oh, that would have been better than what I did. I ended up hitting it from side to side with the back end of an axe (my 8# sledge was at another property). I eventually got things back together, took the car for a very smooth drive, and found a clunking. Removing the muffler that seemed to...
  17. 1

    Considering a Mazda5...What should I know?

    Hooboy, does it wear rear tires. Factory setting is like -1 degree, which I disagree with running on the street. I just today finished installing and adjusting some adjustable rear UCAs to finally get 0 degrees static camber. I'd been aware of the expensive tubular UCAs from the performance...
  18. 1

    Wheel hub rust issues (again!)

    And the bigger hammer worked! Well, actually, the back side of my axe ...at 3.5 pounds it's more maneuverable than my 8" sledge. The bits of hub that protrude into the big holes in the training arms were heavily crusty with rust and scale - quite unlike the rear hub on a '94 Corsica (that had...
  19. 1

    Wheel hub rust issues (again!)

    Thanks! No, wait - whose vehicle are you calling "old"? :-D Now, my '79 Country Squire I bought in about 2004 that had the original floorpans completely rusted out .... I guess I'll ask my 15 year old to have a look at the wire connector to that newfangled ABS stuff.
  20. 1

    Wheel hub rust issues (again!)

    When I first tried putting new brakes in my '12 Mazda5 (in 2018), I was all excited to be able to change rotors without having to unbolt the hub from the spindle like on my previous DDs. Little did I expect to find the rotor hats all fused to the hubs, so that I ended up despairing of getting...
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