Quote:
Originally Posted by _Igor
Just did this job following the guide last night.
You don't need to touch the subframe, 2 minutes with a dremel and stone on the lower control arm and it slides in fine.
My car has 115k miles and a 18V cordless impact drivers got all the bolts off fine.
|
We (a friend and me) just did this yesterday. Took us about 4 hours to put M3 control arms and replace the tie rods on an E90 sedan. Like others, we found the bushings on the lower control arms to be about 0.2-0.3mm too wide for the sub-frame. About a minute each on my bench belt sander solved the problem. Just took the extra off the longer [front] end of the bushings. Just enough so they were still snug in the sub-frame.
We did not loosen anything that didn't need to be loosened, such as strut tops, or the steering rack.
I bought a HF tie rod removal/installation tool for this job, and that needed to be modified slight to work. A few strokes with a coarse flat file on either side of the 1-7/16 adapter to make it fit. Worked great, except the passenger side tie rod outer and inner parts were rusted together. We had to use a big crescent wrench on that side to get that one off (and it was the reason we did this anyway, the inner ball joint was bad).
My only other comment is that an impact driver is not optional for this job, it is basically mandatory. The only way we could get some of the new ball joints in was with the impact wrench. They would simply spin in place. Any gear head should have one anyway.
We'll see how this works out when I get it aligned.