Never Rains But it Pours - Project 3ThirtyFive

I am sure many of you have heard the phrase it never rains but it pours? That phrase was never truer than a few months ago when as tail end Charlie I went to get my new Continental ExtremeSport tires fitted to my Forgeline GA1R monoblock wheels on Project 3ThirtyFive halfway through the summer. It was something I was looking forward to as this would be the first time that I would have run the new Contintental ExtremeContact Sport Having previously run two sets of the previous model, the ExtremeContact DW and was super happy with them in both dry and wet conditions. I chose to go to the newly opened tire shop in Oakville, Adrena Garage having known the owners from their previous place of employment. Everything went well and the car looked well on its new rubber. Now this is where funny things started happening. The next weekend I was heading out to deliver some Racepak datalogging equipment to a customer when a previously unheard noise appeared upon braking at the first intersection. And what was that: a puff of smoke and smell of rubber? Nah, I must have imagined it. Not so, the noise, the smoke and the smell appeared the next time I came to a full stop. At that point I decided that a 3-hour trip one

was not on the cards with this unknown problem, so it was turn around and head back the short distance to MotorWerks HQ. Not having a lot of spare time because of my appointment it was a case of quickly walking around the car and giving it a quick check over.

The smell of burning rubber as I got out of the car was not overpowering but sure did get my attention but there was nothing obvious to be seen. Because of other commitments the BMW was left sitting in the driveway and not touched. When I finally got around to looking at it seemed as if the gap between the new tires and the quarter panel on the passenger side was a lot less than previous and definitely less than the drivers-side. So just in case the problem was the new tires were built slightly bigger than the older version, I threw on the OEM 17” rims and tires. Well, that sorted it, no more smoke, the problem was gone, all I had to do was figure out how the new tire combination was so different from the previous two sets of tires. So, with renewed confidence I decided to go for a two-day jaunt to Calabogie Motorsport Park for the Canadian Sport Compact Series event. On the way I stopped off to tweak a datalogger dash for a customer living an hour East of Oakville. Just before I left, he said the car looks good lowered and for sure it did with the front fender sitting down over the wheel and tire. The problem was the front of Project 3ThirtyFive had yet to be lowered. After driving to Gormley with no issues I continued to Calabogie and before long some issues returned. There was no smoke but at certain speeds and when turning at low speeds weird noises were common place. There was no choice but to continue the trip, enjoy the CSCS event and head home as see what the problem was. Unfortunately the problem when I got home was lack of time again. Maybe because I had my Ford F350 dually available it was too easy to ignore the BMW for a bit. That is until I had no other choice. The guys at Adrena Garage had offered to check out the issue but as a stubborn Scotsman I decided to find the problem myself and if I did not get my ass in gear I would be working in the driveway in the snow as the weeks were flying by. Why not the garage you ask? That’s because CooperRSR is in there and it cannot be moved around. So before I did anything else I measured from the fender lip to the ground and the passengers side was 45mm lower. Well that’s not right, it accounted

for the lowered look of the car but what was the issue? Off came the OEM 17” rim and I broke out an inspection light for a closer lookey see. And there it was, a broken spring and that would indeed account for the the lowered ride height and the tire smoke. Weirdly the 17” tires were untouched but on closer inpection of the new 19” Contis I found the

The damage to the new Continental ExtremeSport tire caused by the broken spring

The broken spring! The light rust on the broken section tells me it has not been broken for long

Zimmerman replacement rotors I had got from FCP Euro who have an amazing warranty on the parts they sell called their Lifetime Replacement

inside of the tire had indeed been rubbed away by interference with the broken spring. No problem I said, I had a set of Bilstein B8 Sport series struts and Eibach springs at home that really should have been fitted before now. But there was more damaged than just the spring. Because there was nothing to support the weight of the car the constant pounding had bent the anti-roll bar link and it would need to be replaced also. And while I was at it I decided to install the Guarantee. And the really interesting thing is that parts used in racing are also included in this warranty which is great considering I have just recieved a bunch of suspension parts from them for our project MINI Cooper RSR. Now we get to the bit where it never rains but it pours! Going by the first two YouTube videos I watched about upgrading the struts to Bilsteins I would have to detach the control arm, tension strut and tie rods. No problem you say and normally I

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would agree, I’ve been detaching ball joints since I was sixteen. Only I find out BMW does not use ball joints that are interference fits like most other

manufacturers, okay so what does that mean? I could see that undoing the nut on the ball joint would be a problem, especially if the car had gone through thirteen Canadian winters like 3ThirtyFive had.

Yes, the dreaded rust had attacked the threads on the ball joint that protruded thru the nut. That in itself is nothing new, normally a thorough soaking overnight with something like PB B’laster Rust Penetrant and/or a bit of heat along with a severe attack with a wire brush on the exposed threads normally fixes the problem and the nut comes off. Normally I said, but with the ball joint shaft not being retained by the interference fit the shaft wants to rotate as soon as a there is no tension to stop it rotating. Now BMW has provided a way to hold the shaft but that is where I made a huge mistake. There is a pocket for a Torx 40 to be inserted into the shaft to help stop it rotating. With the copious quantities of rust it was not easily identified as a Torx, I assummed it was an Allen as that is what is on the strut itself. Thinking everything was going well, the nut was coming loose when the Allen socket popped out rounding out the Torx pocket and giving me no way of retaining the shaft as I tried to undo the nut over the end of the threads. So how did I find out it was a Torx? I had looked at a few Youtube.com videos but I have no idea where they get these cars without rust on all these bolts but it isn’t from Canada. They seemed to be able to remove the nuts without using the Torx. It was just about that time I saw a Facebook link to a FCP Euro instructional video about some other issue. And before long I had scooted over to their website and searched e90 on their DIY Blog. And there was plenty to check out on the e90 listed there althought they did not have one about strut replacement. In fact I came across a mod I had not even heard about, TRW does a kit that allows you to fit e90 M3 front suspension to any standard BMW 3 series. The modified geometry it provides will be a huge asset to anyone tracking or aggressivevly driving. Definately something to think about when ordering the parts I need. Gareth Foley Of FCP Euro does a great job in all the DIY videos he does and in addition to showing the tools required, they list them in the video link shown below, which is where I found out it was a Torx not an Allen. So the moral of this bit

of the story is to never assume anything. Cars have changed over the last fifty years and just because manufacturers used to do something a certain way never assume it is still so. With the nut stuck on the rusted tip of the ball joint shaft there is only one answer to removing the control arm and that is to cut the nut off. Luckily I have plenty of cordless DeWalt tools that this was an easy procedure. Now that is not strictly true as I found lots of comments online about using a jack to put pressure on the bottom of the ball joint and holding it against the weight of the car forcing the shaft into the knuckle and causing a slight interference fit. This only worked with one of the six ball joints for me.

So what started out as a fairly straight forward strut and spring replacement along up a brake rotor upgrade has turned into a bunch of work because of the rust on 3ThirtyFive. This little project has also taught me another thing, like many other things on the Internet you cannot take everything you see as being the truth; as being the only way to do things. The methodology I saw in those first couple of videos where the strut and knuckle are released from the ball joints sounded right to me as when we tried to change the struts on Cooper RSR, leaving the control arms attached and pulling the strut out through the wheel opening, it turned out to be a nightmare. It was only after I was researching the parts required to assemble the Bilstein struts I came across videos where the struts were being changed with the control arms attached and there seemed to be no extreme effort and cursing and swearing during the process. The interesting thing was that neither video explained how important it was to fit the strut mount washer. By all accounts is it is installed upside down or in the wrong place the strut has an issue rotating and you will be heading an annoying popping noise. I already had a pait of strut top mounts sitting waiting to go on the Bilsteins but on further investigation I should just have ordered FCP Euro’s strut top kit. This would have allowed me to have complete strut assemblies ready to install instead of waiting to reuse some of the parts coming off 100k mile struts. You will read in the next issue how we chose to overcome these problems and in the meantime we are going to look at ways of coating threads so the new components we fit will not present the same problems in the future. We will also have alink to our new MotorWerks Garage YouTube channel showing how to properly assemble the Bilstein struts.

Project 3ThirtyFive is a 2009 e90 335i that was purchased new from Budds’ BMW in Oakville, ON by our Editor Ian Rae and it currently has 171473 kilometers (107170 miles) on it.

We appreciate FCP Euro for allowing us to link to video on their DIY Blog. https://blog.fcpeuro.com