Hi All,
I’m after a bit of advice please.
I fairly recently bought a late 2005 BMW E91, 330i M Sport. It had a 181k on the clock when I got it, and has 183k on it now. It has a full BMW service history, and a load of other bits and pieces, but no paperwork to back it up particularly. To note though, it does have a Bird B3 Bilstein suspension kit on it.
Anyway the back story, when I test drove it etc. I hadn’t driven a bmw with the birds kit on it before, and the body felt a bit wobbly over certain bumps and did the BMW shimmy thing at the back end, but was assured it was all ok – and I ended up buying it as I did seem to drive alright overall. After a while and thinking “nah, this isn’t right” and then noticing that the fairly full treaded continental tyres on them were a bit shredded, the huge amount of rear toe on the rear wheels was then noticed. Also the roads locally to me are a bit bumpier than the test drive route I did, and it’s really unsettled over bumps. So a full alignment later on a hunter jig on 05-10-2016 @ 182,726 miles (even though I had a printout of an alignment done about only 2.5k miles previous to this @180,234 on 21-05-2016, so I’d discounted an alignment issue) – well, the car then still handled like a dog because the rear tyres were all stepped due to the previous rear toe in! As one of the rear wheels had a crack in it I discovered when I took them off (18” MV3’s), I sourced a set of second hand wheels (17” bmw style 188s) off the e90post forum with some Michelin Pilot Sports on them – unfortunately when I picked them up, I was quite tired and didn’t notice that the front tyres had a strange wear pattern on them. So after fitting this new set of wheels with new tyres, the car wandered all about the place from the front as these were shot!
Anyway, after then buying a set of new front tyres (pilot sport 4’s) and the pilot sport 2’s on the back, all 4 tyres were good with decent tread on them – the car was a lot better handling, but I think the subframe bushings need changing after reading up on “the bmw shimmy” on the internet and it was still doing this – and it still didn’t feel right.
Basically the back end tramlines a lot and shimmy’s about, like the back of the car isn’t connected to the wheels…so I guess subframe bushings?
Now the crux of this story is – last weekend (11-11-2016 @ 183029) I had an MOT done, and the car passed with no advisories. I then drove to Wales this weekend (circa 250 miles) and when it started raining on the M4, to be honest the car was a bit scary to drive, and I had to take it really gently – the tramlines caused by the trucks on the inside lane were murderous. Driving back home, I only made it about 50 miles or so, and I pulled into the motorway services to have a pee stop, I took a cursory glance at the rear tyres – and saw that the tyres were down to their canvas on the inside edge…and well past the steel bead too. Cue a lot of phone calls later and I ended up forcing my Dad to drive out 200+ miles with my front wheels from the 18” MV3’s that I still had so I could limp the car home…. Not fun for anyone involved – but it was Sunday and nothing was open and I couldn’t get hold of any recover that day – you would not believe how grateful I was! That said, it was lucky I checked my tyres to be honest, that could have been nasty if I’d carried on driving unaware that my tyres were utterly shredded as if I’d done a drift day… They’ve basically gone from a set of full depth tread tyres to totally shredded in 718 miles (when I swapped tyres at the motorway services).
Now extreme tyre wear like that seems a bit more than just subframe bushings? I’ve had a recent alignment too, and the guys didn’t feel anything loose – although it is all under tension so I guess it’s difficult to tell. The car looked like it was aligned properly – they even loaded it full of water and everything to get the correct preload. I guess I should mention it’s running the staggered wheel setup – 225 wide fronts, 255 wide rears.
Help please!
I can also post photos and copies of the printouts from the alignments if that helps.
Cheers
