How To Assemble a Super Pivot Joint

Submitted by AVTekk on Thu, 2007-11-22 19:08.

Nov 22

Suicidedoors.com gets several calls a week about how hard it is to assemble a super pivot joint. I agree, its a little tough. You want the pivot ball to be tight, not a sloppy loosy loose one. Here's how you can put them together with typical tools, we used to put them together like this but now we have a neat pneumatic ram to compress the bushings.

Step 1.
Gather your tools. You will need a hammer/mallet, snap ring pliers, flathead screwdriver, a welding table with a threaded hole in it lol, a wrench, a 1/2" bolt with a spacer, and a spacer with a hole in it to lift the super pivot off the table. Instead of the table and spacers, you can simple use a nut and a couple sockets to compress the joint in the follow steps.

Step 2.
Insert the first snap ring.

Step 3.
Flip pivot joint over and drop in one of the big washers.

Step 4.
Insert the big half of the poly bushing.

Step 5.
Put in the pivot ball and tap it with a mallet to push the big half of the poly bushing down to the washer.

Step 6.
Stare at what you've done so far and say good job.

Step 7.
Put the other half of the poly bushing in.

Step 8.
Using a 4 link end bushing we beat the small half of the poly bushing in as far as it will go.

Step 9.
Drop the other big washer in place.

step 10.
Rebeating the hell out of it some more to compress the bushing halves.

Step 11.
See the threaded hole in the table? That's where this bolt screws into. We put the bolt through the pivot ball and tighten down real tight. With the spacer under the pivot housing, there is room for the pivot ball to press down with the force of the bolt.

Step 12.
Tighten that thing down real tight!!! This method is only compressing the bottom half so you will need to get everything super tight to get the snap ring in place. If you have thin wall deep socket, you may want to replace the spacer in the pic to compress the large washer and top poly bushing. However, if the socket is too large, you won't be able to get the snap ring in place.