The "lifetime" bushings in the Blackhawk arms look pretty good IMO. But you could always put factory rubber bushings in the arms. They are made to accept factory bushes.
It was definitely a good trail fix for a bad situation. That's a rough trail failure and would leave a lot of people stranded. Nice that you had someone in the group with a trail welder.
not meant to be argumentative but I have it from a reliable source at Toyota that the factory arms are in...
Typically you don't need to take much more than the center ridge off the arms to have enough clearance for the tie rod. You can see on my radius arm that's really all that was removed. This isn't going to weaken the arms at all and is usually all that is needed. Even if you have to take a bit...
I can tell from the pics that those arms were basically notched to clear the tie rod, removing the upper "T" of the arm. That's definitely going to weaken the arms significantly! It's not necessary to remove that much from the arm and as long as you're not removing any complete portion of the...
Enough people have used a grinder on the factory arms without issue and in the 20 years I've been driving an 80 and been on this forum nearly as long I can't think of a single instance where an arm has failed as a result of clearancing the arms. I'm still running OEM arms that have also been...