Technical Front leaf spring bushes

I am building a 1941 Chev pickup and will be retaining the I beam axle and parallel leaf springs for the front end. The original springs had bronze bushes. I am looking at using some springs of a latter model car to soften the ride and go for a bit longer spring. I will be moving mounts and steering box to suit.

The all use rubber bushes. Does this cause any issues with steering on the front parallel leaf setup? Does this help with the ride? Hopefully someone has been down this road and can share their experience.

Thanks

 

I looked into rubber bushing for my '37 Chevrolet truck, no one made any or even recommended any. I found mine road much better with teflon type liner between each leaf. It was quieter and softer riding.

If you keep the front bushing all metal, the axle will stay aligned, then use rubber in the shackles.
With only 1 3/4" wide springs and such small diameters bushings, I doubt you find very many springs that will fit the hanger, let alone getting a rubber bushing in there. Seems like a lot of work for very little gains.

 

IH Scouts used 1 3/4” wide springs.

 

Here is the GM Heritage site information for the '41 trucks ( https://www.gm.com/content/dam/comp...its/chevrolet-trucks/1941-Chevrolet-Truck.pdf ) , about 1/2 into it is the front spring information. The factory springs have a 260 lb deflection rate, ( 1" drop for every 260lbs ). My '37 had 410 lb deflection rate, so by '41 GM had already softened the ride quite a bit.

 

I've used polyurethane bushings that have a steel sleeve inside. The best of both worlds. The sleeve works well against the bolt, and poly gives a good ride, but not mushy like rubber can be. I bought a cheap polyurethane set for a Chevy Tahoe that have I think 3" wide springs, and I chucked the bushings up in my lathe and easily turned them down to fit, then cut them and the sleeves to length. Worked great, and being black they didn't look weird on my old car.

 

Thanks for all the replies, the poly sounds like the way to go as I have a lathe. As for spring mounts, the ch***is I will be using had all the mounts removed by the previous owner, I have the original mounts but it will be little extra work if I have to put different mounts on to use different springs. I have the original springs but they have wear from use over the years. It looks like abrasive dust was between the leaves and wore away part of the spring in the last 70 years. Springs have got dear in Australia but in the spirit of hotroding using parts from another car makes scene. My daily driver is a 20 year old falcon ute and it has leaf springs in the back, Spares are plentiful and the made different packs depending on if it was a wagon 3/4 ton ute or 1 ton ute.

 

Look into early Willy's Jeep springs, I used a set on the front of my 38 GMC without much work.

 

I'm not sure if this will be of any value to the conversation or not, but recently I faced a similar conundrum. While I'm sure in my case an option existed for improvement if I had been willing to spend the big bucks that seems to be the popular solution to a problem in this hobby, my interest is in get it together, make it functionable and if need be improve it later. I call it hot rodding?
Having said that, did you know you can buy hockey pucks in different ounce weights and those weights correspond to rubber density? I didn't until I went to buy a couple.