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I have to get up early tomorrow, so a quick post.
The idler arm bushing is installed in the front end of my beetle:
and the car is back on its wheels. This will hopefully tighten up the steering and help to eliminate the front end vibration at around 45 mph.
I'm also working on replacing the shift rod bushing to tighten up the shifting and eliminate the gearshift rattle that happens at certain rpms. I got it installed tonight
I'll try to get the rod and the gear shift hooked back up so I can go test drive it by Saturday.
By the way, a bushing is a sleeve of some material to allow some part of the car to move within another piece, and the bushing takes the wear instead of permanent parts. I think perhaps the disinction between a bearing and a bushing is that a bushing takes the load of a part that doesn't move very fast or continuously, wheras the item that a bearinng supppors moves constantly (like the wheels or parts of the engine).
The idler arm bushing and the shifter bushing have different roles to play, so they're made out of very different materials. The idler arm bushing is bronze, because that takes heavy cross-loads to keep the wheels in alignment in turning. The shift rod bushing is a plastic, because the shift rod doesn't take very heavy forces but it needs to be very tight in its bracket, so it's made of a material that can be compressed when the rod gets pushed through it.