Rear suspension top out bushes

As I have mentioned before, the rear suspension top out bushes have been causing quite a lot of pain. Obviously there are no spares available for this bike and sourcing something appropriate was proving quite difficult. The bushes are made of rubber and are 50mm OD, 32mm ID and 25mm tall (some of you may recognise those numbers as metric conversions of 2", 1 1/4" and 1"). I managed to find some large bushes that are 50mm OD, 23mm ID and 50mm tall. Plenty of material for me to make mistakes and I also had to order 5 so I've got plenty to make replacements in the future. 

Here's one compared to the better of the originals

I started of trying to grind the rubber using a toolpost mounted dremel in the lathe but this was going to be really slow so I thought I'd try a brand new fine pitch holesaw and it worked perfectly.

The only issue was that I had to stop about halfway through as the rubber was warming up causing it to get softer and move around in the chuck. I plunged just over the required 25mm deep and parted it off using my new creation; the 'Knife-Lathe'. This is just a stanley knife clamped to the workbench on top of some engineers parallels to get the blade 25mm above the bench surface. A few careful spins and the new bush is basically done.

The washer on the bottom of the bush has a bevel to it so I quickly sanded a matching chamfer onto the rubber using a disc sander. I didn't get a pic of this but here they are assembled into the castings with the old rubbers in front

A little bit of epoxy to hold it all together and it's all done

It might not look like much but these had the potential to halt the works for a very long time so I'm really pleased to get these done. I'm also pretty pleased with how they turned out, they're how I imagine it would have looked new. Just need to reassemble it all now!