How to Strengthen Discovery 1 Rear Trailing Arms

Saar | May 27, 2020 | How To, Mods | No Comments

One of the known failure points of a Land Rover Discovery 1 that trails off road is the rear trailing arms, it is not rare to see a disco that failed to climb a rock with the rear wheel somewhere under the body, instead of the normal position.

The reason for that is the weak rear trailing arms. They are too weak to handle the weight of the disco on them (while stopping suddenly on a rock, in Reverse 🙂 )

Here is how it looks when it bents (the circled part should be straight 🙂 ):

So, in order to avoid that, I decided to strengthen my rear trailing arms. There are 3 ways of doing so:

The simplest: go online and order some new heavy duty trailing arms as in the above link (for example)
Still easy, but requires some work 🙂 : strengthen the current, original arms (will be detailed here later)
The hardest, heavy duty one: building new arms, almost from scratch. (will be detailed here as well)

In any of these solutions, you will have to remove the control arm first. I did it one at the time, so the Disco was standing safe on its wheels. You will need a 17mm spanner and socket/wrench (also, 17mm). and a 24mm spanner/wrench. All you have to do is carefully remove the 3 17mm bolts that holds it in one and and the 24mm bolt on the other end. See the short video below:

I choose option #2, with the help of Oren Stavski, strengthen the original arms. I used a 2mm tube that wrapped around the original arm, then, added a 3mm half tube on the upper side of it. it should do the work (hopefully 🙂 )

In order to wrap the original arm, I had to cut the tube to 2 halfs, then, welded it again.

That the final result:

See the video for details:

The last option, here designed and built by Chaim Ben Atia, the ultra heavy duty one, is cutting the original arms, use a thick tube and weld the bushings part to that tube. in the pictures below, they used a 8mm sidewall tube which was bent twice in 14 degrees to improve the wheel travel.

First, cut the original bushing end for re-using it.