So I've done exactly jack with the suspension. With finishing up a Masters degree, stepping up to put together the pre-ship review package on short notice when the program Flight Assurance manager was in a motorcycle accident (he's ok, but was out of work for about a month), changing units in the Navy Reserve and building a top shelf exhaust system for my Cadillac Northstar powered Fiero, I haven't had time to give Das Bimmah the love it deserves.
I wore out the tires on the 18's. I still have the wheels, but since I'd been putting a lot of miles on the car, I got 90K mile warranted Michelins for the 15's. I even stepped back from the 225's it had when I bought it to 205/65's. The result is almost 23 mpg at 80 mph. Not sure if that's good for an M30 or not. Theoretically I could push that to a little over 25 by swapping from a 3.46 to a 2.81 rear.
When I put the 15's back on, the shimmy under braking problem went away. It has recently reappeared, so I'll actually have to do something about it soon.
I did run across a post in which someone had used E53 X5 TAB's in the front of his E32. He posted pics and they looked like they'd be stiffer than the E34 M5 bushings. I may do that...
I definitely will go to spherical bearing control arm bushings in the front. I found these:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/320661384880
The price is way too high in my book, but since BMW themselves used hard pivots in the control arms of their top shelf luxury coupe, I feel better about doing it in my lowly 5 series.
In other news, my heater core sprung a leak.
I just got finished replacing it.
Pics:
IHKR III exposed:
IHKR III torn apart down to the evaporator, with heater core removed:
Side shot of how deep into the dash you have to go to get to the above shot:
New unit in box... pretty impressively engineered shipping container:
New heater core reinstalled. I kept the original pipes, but cleaned the ends and swapped in the o-rings that came on the pipes with the new heater core:
The culprit:
All the interior components looked like someone had at some point put a sealed 2 litre bottle of Coke in a paint mixer, then promptly opened it inside the car and put it down in front of the shifter to depressurize. EVERYthing had some sticky mess on it. I cleaned all that up. While the center console was out, I ran by my buddy's house and used his carpet cleaner to shampoo the gunk out of the carpet under the center console. I know no one will see it, but it makes me feel better.
I'd been having problems with intermittency in my left front tweeter, so I addressed some wiring problems with the radio. Likely won't help the speaker problem, but that also made me feel better.
The radio harness as it was:
A previous installer added a pioneer 6 disk changer in the trunk. To add the wiring, he had cut the insulation ONLY (not the wires) pulled it back both directions from the cut, soldered additional wires to the exposed copper and taped up the splices. Interesting way of making a side splice... BUT a later installer had come through, cut the wires that the first installer had carefully spliced and taped up the cut wires. He also left the changer and harness in place. Wow.
My work--proper crimp splices and shrink tube:
In addition, the 20 year old BMW harness tape was peeling off the harnesses, so I had to redress several of the bundles with small zip ties. That's boring so I didn't take any pictures.
But the car really rides well!
