Why UHMW Is the Best Bushing Material

Small changes to your machine can make a big difference. Different ball joints, different axles, or different bearings can change the way your side-by-side rides. For the most part, stock components are good enough for standard riding. But there’s one part where the difference between stock and the aftermarket option is so great that you should upgrade no matter how you ride: your A-arm bushings.

Don’t Skimp on A-Arm Bushings!

A low-quality material will lead to premature wear of not just the bushings, but the wheel bearings and tie rod ends, too. And if you really abuse them, you could even damage your A-arms. That’s because worn-out bushings allow your A-arms to move and shake in ways that your suspension isn’t designed to handle.

For something this important, UHMW is what you want and what you need. UHMW bushings are so tough that they should never need replaced. They’re great for worry-free casual riding and high-octane trails and mud. Here’s why nothing can compete with UHMW.

The Right Bushing Material Makes All the Difference

Before we explain why UHMW is great, we need to look at some of the other common materials. Generally, A-arm bushings are made of Delrin, HDPE, or UHMW. These are all different kinds of complex plastic. A rough breakdown of quality goes like this: HDPE is better than Delrin, and UHMW is better than HDPE. The crazy part? Most stock bushings are made from a material that’s worse than Delrin, which is what we’re looking at first.

Delrin

Delrin is the more well known-name for polyoxymethylene, and it’s used for low-budget parts. This material is a hard, stiff, and smooth plastic—which is OK, but it is prone to wear. They need replaced often and if you ride hard, you’ll find that they’re not cut out for you at all. If you’ve got Delrin, you should upgrade the first chance you get.

HDPE

High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) bushings are a definite upgrade over Delrin and stock bushings. They can handle a wider range of conditions than Delrin and will wear better. However, this type still wears over time and needs replaced occasionally. If you’re not careful, you can end up riding on worn-out bushings for a while without realizing and do damage to other suspension parts—which brings us to UHMW.

UHMW

The real overachievers are ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMW) bushings. That’s because UHMW is a very special material that has some interesting characteristics.

First of all, it is super stinking tough. In fact, it’s pretty much indestructible. It’s the same material we use on our skid plates and it’s used in some bulletproof vests. It offers incredible hardness and will outlast your stock bushings by years. We’ve been working with UHMW for many applications for a long time now, and we’ve never seen it break or bend when it’s not supposed to.

UHMW is also self lubricating. That means that as it wears, the microscopic UHMW particles that come off of it act as lubrication and reduce friction. Even if it wasn’t one of the most resilient materials on Earth, it would take a lot longer to wear down due to these self lubricating properties.

When you combine those two aspects of UHMW, you’re left with a material that’s perfectly suited for use as an A-arm bushing. So that’s what we make ours out of. They’ll last a very, very long time—so long that you may not even have to replace them in the entire lifetime of your machine. They are the perfect choice to replace your stock parts with. You don’t want to wait until your stock bushings start going bad, because by then you’ve already started to wear out your other components.

We have UHMW bushings available for all sorts of side-by-sides. Get yours today and you’ll never buy another set again.