[71dsp]

I’m in the middle of installing BimmerWorld front tension rod spherical bearings. A few notes for those of you thinking of installing these.

The curb descent damper has to be removed. It’s wider than the fork in the subframe adapter. Of course, BMW decided to rivet the curb descent damper so you have to drill out the rivet. I drilled it out, managed to get the rivet “guts” out then 3D printed an adapter with a 6mm jam nut so I could use a screw to reattach the damper. Another idea would be to install another rivet nut that’s either 6mm or 8mm (might have to drill it out for an 8mm).

The process is not too bad, but I ended up removing the bumper cover. That made getting to the horizontal bolt on the subframe adapter a TON easier. Plus the bumper cover is pretty easy and straightforward to remove.

BW’s instructions say not to torque the 4mm bolts for the two halves more than 5 ft*lbs. it needs to be way way less than that. More like 3NM. I stripped one of the hexes on the button head bolts (they’re only 2.5mm Allen heads) so I ended up replacing them with flange head bolts. The Allen drive is so tiny, that I’m worried they’d strip after the loctite cured if I ever needed to remove them.

Also, I’ve had digital GearWrench torque wrenches for a few years, but with the TTY bolts on this car and my Golf R, the torque angle measurement has been awesome. I mark the bolts and I’ve found that the GW finds the right torque angle fairly consistently. Pictures from the front bolt which is 68NM + 180°. You can see how close the GW measurement is to my 180° markings that I put on the bolt head.

Can’t wait to get it aligned and see what a difference these make!