Can you think of a faster way to be miserable? Spend the weekend drilling and burning out the TAB rubber, push in new greased up SuperPro polys, finally get everything bolted back together... take it for a test drive and the clunking is worse than ever! Here's a little background...

It's an 82 240 wagon. About a year ago I picked up some slightly used Bilsteins and had a shop install them. On the drive home I noticed that the rear suspension was now much louder, almost clunking. I concluded that the tighter shocks magnified the weakness of the worn suspension. I later decided that the bushings finally needed changing--I assumed they were original.

I settled on putting new poly bushings in the TAs (rear only) and torque rods, leaving the Panhard and front TA bushings from before. I should have stopped when I got the car jacked up and discovered that the torque rod bushings were already poly (the red ones--who knows how they got there, or when). When I lowered the TAs the bushings looked OK. Should have left them--there's a good chance they'd been replaced at some point. Hours and hours later, everything was back together (I left the red torque rod bushings in there).

The clunking remains. It's directly associated with bumps, not accelaration. It sounds like dense metals banging, almost like a bolt banging around within a sleeve. Both the panhard and front TA bushings had minor cracking--could these be the problem? Could it be something with the shocks or how they're mounted? U-joints? Loose bolts? Any help is appreciated.