Nissan Spec-V: Part 10: Installing Bushings and Converting to 5-Lug Hubs
9/25/2006
Soft rubber suspension bushings weigh down the stock Sentra suspension. Soft rubber is good for a smooth, quiet ride but it hurts performance by making the suspension alignment inaccurate under load. Soft rubber also slows down the car’s response to steering inputs and dulls the driver’s feel of the car.
Global Performance Products gave us a set of hard 90-durometer polyurethane bushings for our front lower control arms.
Global also provided hard urethane rear trailing arm bushings.
Global’s products have an optional bushing with an offset hole that can be used to get additional positive caster. Positive caster causes the tire to lean into the turns when the wheel is turned, which helps traction. Positive caster also helps stability.
The stock rear tailing arm bushings are made of rubber with cutouts that allow the rear suspension to move around under side load and braking. There can be over one inch of movement. The solid hard polyurethane cuts this movement down to a very small fraction of an inch.We are going to run 235/40Z17 NT01s with 17x8-inch wheels. We’ll need an offset of 38-40mm to fit inside the wheel wells. We were unable to find a 4-lug lightweight, forged wheel to fit on the Sentra. However, there are many quality wheels made in the 5-lug 5x114.3 bolt pattern that cars such as the EVO, STi, 350Z, RSX Type-S and other cars use. The choice was simple, use expensive custom wheels or convert our car to 5 lug.
Our front hubs were easy to modify. We used ARP extended racing studs from a Spec Miata application, and purchased them from Summit Racing. We simply drilled our hubs to the new bolt pattern using a turret vice on a drill press and pressed the new studs into the hubs with a hydraulic press.
The rear hubs were not so simple. The stock rear hub material is thin in areas where there is no stud, so we could not re-drill it. Instead we used hubs from a 1995-1999 Maxima. 
These hubs have a larger bearing so Technosquare had to make adaptor sleeves on a lathe to fit over the stock axle stubs. Using the sleeves and installing the beefier hubs is just a matter of bolting them on.
We pressed out the short stock Maxima studs and pressed in the longer racing APR studs.After modifying our hubs to accept new wheels, we chose the lightweight and strong Volk TE37 from an RSX Type-S fitment.