Its only been on the car since January or so of 2012, and hasn't been driven a lot. The bolts were torqued down after the cars weight was on the suspension and the ride height set. Driver side front strut rod bushing just fell off. I was driving and noticed, out of nowhere, it started pulling to left when braking. Limped it home and started checking, and noticed the front on was gone.

Of course none of the parts stores had them in stock, but rock auto did beat all their prices on poly by almost $30, Moog parts. Now its a waiting game for it to show up. Going to just replace them all.

roe

I've run cars hard with poly bushings and have seen some bad issues that some would say can't happen...Movement between the shell and poly insert...Split and disintegrate....Had one set get soft like the urethane was breaking down after about 30,000 miles... Usually when they split and/or fail like what you're describing

A} The bushing is not within spec like the factory piece {too fat,long,wide, etc...}

B}Something else in the suspension is moving too much creating undue stress on it

C} The material the bushing is made from is'nt up to the task..

And now for the factory authorized excuses..

You must have installed them wrong
Your car have leaked something on it to make it fail like that..
Only poly on my street car builds are the sway bars anymore...I just don't need the headaches...Do they make the car handle better??? Of course they do but IMO they just don't hold up like the factory style material in the long run...

This one split and disintegrated. There may have been undue stress placed in it by the LCA. The poly bushing was allowing it to move fore and aft, even while loaded. I was replacing those with rubber in the next couple of weeks anyway, so I'll do them all at the same time.

roe

In my opinion, strut rod bushings should be rubber or heim joints. The way the strut rod/K-frame interface is constructed, the bushing must compress and de-compress with each up/down movement of the suspension. Poly is not compressible enough for this task.
When using 6061 T6 aluminum strut rods, I observed flexing of the strut rod when used with poly bushings, but not with rubber bushings.
I reccommend that you cancel the order for poly, and get rubber.

This has happened in the AMC world too. Most would recommend rubber or heim's as well. AMC's have trailing arms with a bracket bolted to the frame. I've seen several failures most alarming have been the strut rod itself breaking and have also seen the frame bracket tear out of the frame.

Strut rods are designed to absorb some lateral force so they need to be able to flex. The rubber allows this.

I have not heard of any such failures on an AMC with the heim joints, but those are a relatively new item for us.

I agree also, poly is not the way to go because they don't last long, just like you found out.

I am finding that the stuff I rebuilt on my car in 2005 is already wearing out, not to mention the stuff I did in 1986(my car sat unused for 18 years).

If you drive them, be prepared to work on them is what I found out.

I've had tons of issues with poly strut rod,swaybar,and end link bushings. Those blue MOOG bushings are lucky if they last 8000 miles.