The Search for the Great Suspension - Bilsteins - Part 2

  With the lower control arms and the lollipops taken care of, it was time to find struts. The front passenger side was leaking when I took it for an alignment several months ago. Needless to say the front end has no dampening happening at this time.

  Since this is daily driven, I have no problem replacing the struts with factory pieces. Helena has the Sports Suspension package on it already. Several different sites have struts specifically for this. They range anywhere from $120-$200 per strut from the decent manufacturers (Bilstien, Myle, Sachs, KYB). Some of these feature a 4 year warranty and better than stock performance. Unfortunately I just wasn't familiar enough with them to know which to choose. The OEM BMW struts we $250 a piece. I definitely wasn't  going that route. 

  I just needed to get some struts that would do the job. As I'm a car guy, going stock isn't always the easiest option. The premier strut, spring package for these cars are either the Bilstein Sports Struts with the H&R Sport Springs or the Koni Sports with H&R Sport Springs. There seems to be a huge following for either strut choice. It depends on who you talk to.

  This leads to a whole different conversation. The front end of a stock 328i differs from the M3 just a bit. I'm strictly speaking of the 96-99 M3 here. Key differences:

• The sway bar end link attaches to the strut itself. This allows for more control as opposed to a control arm mounted link. The M3 also has a lighter, smaller sway bar because of this.
• The upper strut mount is different. It is offset allowing more camber and castor.

  I tend to follow the Bilstein crowd for the E36. I have nothing against Koni. I have a set of sports on my Honda and I love them.

• The Bilstein Sports(Left Part #: 35-044024, Right Part #: 35-044031) run on average at about $200 each. They are a direct bolt on to the 328i.
• Bilstein also offers Sports for the M3(Left Part #: 35-105855, Right Part #
   35-105862) 
  These have the mounting tab for the End Link on the strut housing.
   Going price is around $250. 

  These will bolt to your 328 just fine. You can choose to run the M3 end link or keep the stock 328 ones. In terms of how this effects the performance of the car, I'm not sure. It depends on your driving style. The M3 was designed differently for a reason. I don't have much more than that really. 

   I dug in and began to check the forums, group sites, and internet for nicely used Bilstein Sport struts for an M3 or 328i. I searched for quite a while. I found some decent deals on some but, nothing really worth pulling the trigger for. I had some other stuff to keep me busy as well (see my stereo related posts) but, the suspension as whole was over do for a replacement. 

  That's when I stumbled upon a craigslist post for a set of used 96-99 M3 front struts and a set of H&R Sport Springs. Nice! The price was right as well. One problem, they were located in Pennsylvania. Not to worry, I have some good friends that live there. I called up my buddy Mike and asked him if he would be kind enough to take a look for me. He kindly obliged. He being a man of knowledge in car related things, I trusted his judgement on these. After a bit of schedule maneuvering he was able to meet up with the seller and make the deal. I was the happy owner of the lot. 

  Next up was to get them down here. I talked to our shipping guru, and friend Barry, at my work place. I'm able to ship stuff through work but, I wasn't sure if/how this would work. After a quick conversation, an address, and a form, I had a printed shipping label ready to go. Barry, you da man! I emailed that up to Mike and away we went.

  They arrived 3 days later. Freshly wrapped and well packed. They were looking pretty for sure. I was holding off on looking at strut mounts to see how these looked. The M3 strut mounts still attached, looked pretty good. I'm going to get the expert opinion from my buddy Jeremy before we proceed with the install. 

  All they needed was a little clean up and some paint. Then, they would be ready for install. More to come on that. 

The Search for the Great Suspension - Control Arms, Lollipops - Part 1

  Many an evening has been spent pouring over the BMW related forums. Looking intently for that rightly priced front suspension components to replace poor Helena's tired front end.

What needs replacing:

-Both front struts

-Both strut mounts

-Ball joint on passenger side lower control arm.

-Both front lollipops.

  The front end on the E36 has lower control arms shaped like a "L" One end has the ball joint which connects to the spindle. The other slides in a round bushing. This is the lollipop. Named as such because it well, looks like a lollipop. In the middle of this control is another ball joint that is attached to the sub frame. 

For reference. The M3 has the longer blue end link for the sway. All other models use the shorter red one, that attaches to the lower control arm. Picture Reference Link.

  These particular areas wear quickly. BMW specifies a check of these areas in the inspection II process. Most sites/forums/people will tell you that E36 struts only last about 30-60k before needing to be replaced. Some of the ball joints are actually made of a plastic material. Over time they deform causing the tire to move during cornering and shimmy going straight. Tie rod ends have similar problems. Definitely not good things.

  My search for a quality replacement lower control arm lead me to Bimmerworld*. They had the best price, at that time, on the Meyle HD control arm. These have upgraded, hardened, full metal ball joints in them. Better able to handle the stresses of the front end. They also have lollipops and are willing, for a charge, to press the bushings in for you. Since I don't have a press at this time, that way was a no brainier. I don't want to go crazy with poly but, I wanted to give these a shot this time around.

  As a side note if you are running poly bushings in the lollipops, I hear you fall into a different class in the SCCA. I'm not an expert in the area so don't quote me. Since I will have a full spare set of lollipops I can get them ready for the next go around. It was a win win for me.

  Bimmerworld had a special going on as well. So I ended up scooping up a few other things. One of which included Z3/M3 front shock tower reinforcement plates. 

  The front towers can be a weak point for this chassis. The plates spread the forces exerted more evenly across the whole of the tower. I'm not really sure they are necessary for me, as I'm not planning on making the suspension super hard. This will be a daily driver, for at least now anyway. I figure the piece of mind up front was worth the pennies.

  -Front control arms with ball joints, check.

  -New lollipops with bushings, check.

  -Front strut reinforcement plates check.

* Here is the direct link for the suspension overhaul page: e36 Suspension Overhaul.
   Good info about all of this stuff here as well: e36m3blog. This blog post is very well put together, kuddos to the author.

E36 OEM Head/Tail Light Assembly Install

  After much anticipation I've finally got my new/used headlights installed. I made a plan for Friday night for the install time. I picked up some wings for the "event" which I entitled "wings and workings". The headlights were the primary agenda, followed by OEM taillights, and possibly Harmon Kardon 6x9s for the rear. These were in original OEM boxes and were on good shape. The speaker installation is super straight forward but, I'll save that for later.

  My good friends Eric and Jeremy came over to hang and help with the installations. We all got off to a slow start. Eric decided that my weird indie dance music Pandora station was not up to par. He created some 80s montage station which was actually pretty good. So with some food in our bellies and some decent tunes we got to it.

  Headlights 

  Jeremy started by helping remove the eBay headlights. There were four 8mm bolts holding the lights in. One left and right, and two on top. 

The passenger side light cover was separating from the housing. Jeremy discovered it was a broken clip on the underside. He was able to pull them apart very easily.

Thankfully these eBay lights also came with harnesses so, not hacked wiring. Nice!

  The halos that were wired into the corner light housing were soldered in place. This was nice because I could wire my city lights using the same cables. Since there were two sets of halos on the one headlight I had four total wires. I only needed two. I clipped the two extras off and wrapped the wires in electrical tape.

The other two were used for the city light. Black to black, brown to white. Some solder and some heat shrink later and I have working city lights and a clean install.

  The hardest part for me was getting the 5 adjusters to set properly. I ran the two lower ones on the left and right all the way down. The lights seem to sit very well with them that way. I'll definitely have to do some alignment as well for them. They have two separate adjustment for pivoting left to right and up and down.

Rear tail lights

  So I'm told that rear tail lights on these are a hard thing to remove. Eric and Jeremy had to beat out the old lights with a hammer. No seriously, they had to beat them out. The seals seem to adhere themselves quite substantially. We thought they were glued in place.

  There are four 8mm bolts holding the tails in place. Or at least there should be. I was missing two from the passenger side for some reason. Even with the two missing bolts we had to hammer the studs to get the lights off the car. 

  Then, some simple clean up of the area under the lights. Eric made quick work of this. Take the bulbs out of the old tail light, put them in the new/used tail light. Then slide it into place. Bolts back in. Done.

  There appeared to be some rusted loose metal in the driver side tail light. It looks like perhaps the remnants of the a reflector perhaps? That was right where the crack in the housing was. You can also see where the rust had started eating through the metal on the backside of the light. This is where the bulbs make contact to get their power. My On Board Computer (OBC) would always tell me I had a tail light out. Not anymore! Except sometimes if it's cold and raining. Anyways, I'm happy to have a set of stock, not broken tails out back. 

After Market Head Unit Install - Beats by Dr. Brizow

  The stereo in Helena has always sounded kind of like it was under water. There was no treble, and very little low end. I'm not the kind of stereophile guy who needs it to be perfect but, I'm surprised by the lack of quality from the 10 speaker system Helena came with. This is not the mac daddy Harmon Kardon system just the standard Hifi system. In researching further this seems to be a very common complaint from owners. I'm assuming that Germans didn't need to listen to the radio when they have the sweet sound of a 2.8 inline 6 purring down the autobahn. I'm not that lucky.

  So I started at the easiest place, change the head unit. You need two things for this: a radio adapter harness and an antenna adapter.

  There are several styles of antenna adapters out there. Given there is so little room behind the head unit, I went with an a pastor that had no pigtail. It simply plugs into the stereo flush and then, accepts the Nokia/euro style antenna plug.

  There is very little room behind the head unit for extra wires. This was the hardest part of the install for me. There is a vent and a backing plate the head unit rests on. On the back of the stock head unit there is a small plastic piece protruding proudly. This slides in to the hole on the backing plate.


  The pioneer head unit I had laying around did not have a hole big enough to accept the threads on the proudly protruding plastic piece. So, I ended up using a bolt that would fit and, wrapped it in e-tape. It worked fine for me. Little non factory approved as well. Eh.

  I had to eventually had to press the wires and the harness for the stereo gently back towards the left side of the din opening. It's also a tight spot but I found the harness and adapter would slide in. From what I can tell the whole harness is in between the dash cluster surround and the open space below. There is a cable that drives the air temperature from the center most vent. The harness was getting caught on it. After a twist of the harness as a whole it was like the harness I made was meant to fit there. Seriously, I struggled to get the head unit in there was a good bit. What finally brought it together was spinning the whole harness 360'. Weird. If you don't want to tear up stuff patience was definitely key for this one. 

Comparisons:

 The stock head unit has Amber back lights. The pioneer does not. The pioneer also has a removable face plate which doesn't really fit well into the space provided. The stock tape deck also provided control for the trunk mounted 6 disc changer. Unfortunately the previous owner/s lost the cartridge for it, making it useless right now. I don't really listen to CDs anymore anyway but, on occasion it is nice to have.

  At the end of all of this how does it sound? Well honestly it sounded almost exactly the same as the stock HU (head unit). However the Pioneer has more equalizer settings built in. With this I was able to get more mid and tweets out of the stock speakers. This was good. It made the install worth it to me.

  Now supposedly per the Internets my amp will die any moment because the signals from the stock unit are different than after market one. This is possible but, is that a bad thing? The stock amp does serve a purpose and honestly for 1998, I don't know too many other vehicles with 10 separated, amplified (all be it only slightly) speakers, and a CD changer. BMW didn't do a terrible job at all.

  The problem for me is that my wife's 00 Saturn with a factory tape deck and four speakers; sounds clearer and has more bass than my "luxury sport" mobile with 10. :/ I digress. Moving forward I'd like to try a few things to sort that out. If one bypasses the stock amp then, you will need to cross over the signals going to the front speakers. High, mid, low. A three way cross over.

  The rear deck speakers whether 4in or the hk 6x9s, have the sub and the tweet mounted separately. A two way cross over would be needed here.

  Would new coaxial style 6x9s without amplification sound better off the aftermarket HU? No cross over needed you can just send the full signal straight to the speaker. The rear makes sense and is easy to get at. The fronts however are not. 

  All the speakers wires do route to the amp mounted in the trunk. It's on the drivers side behind the carpeting. Accessing all the incoming and outgoing wires makes thoughts of aftermarket amps or bypassing it altogether easy. I just don't want to hack up and wiring.

  Clearly I'm still working through what to do in this area. More to come on this subject.

After thoughts: 

  If I was going to spend money on a fancy new head unit, it would have to have color adjustment to match the interior. No silver on it either. Black or grey only.

  All the stock speakers run through the factory "amp" which works as a crossover for the speakers and an amp for the "subs." 5.25s in the kick panels. 4s on the deck.

  Changing the amp or, running an amp bypass seems to be the preferred method depending on your budget and the quality of sound you are looking for.

  Not blown speakers will always sound better than blown ones.

New, Used Head Lights - City Light DIY

 

  After much anticipation I'm finally getting rid of these Ebay headlights. Thanks to my buddy Jeremy, I now have a used set of stock headlights. They are in good shape, just needed a little polishing. 

  I'm using the ole Turtle Wax manual kit. Comes with the little sanding pads and some compound. It's ok. The box says clarity in minutes. If by minutes they mean 30 then, sure. The left side light was fairly oxidized so it took a good bit of sanding and polishing to get it looking decent. Maybe I'm just too picky.

  After a bit of polishing and a sore arm later, the lights are looking much better.

  I've had this conversation before about the halos vs no headlights. I went to a parts garage near me on Saturday. The gentleman who owns it showed me his Euro M3 lights he got from Italy. They had city lights in the high beam housing. I had no idea that was a thing on the Euro lights. They looked beautiful. That's what got my gears turning.

  I took a look when I got home to see if there were any good DIY's out there for city lights in stock housings. I stumbled across this post: City Lights with Pics. I felt confident I could manage to make something similar work.

  After work on Monday I stopped by my favorite auto parts store. Three isles in, left, almost to the end of the isle, knee level. They had 3 different variations of lamp pigtails that accepted a 194 bulb. I went with the 90 degree ones due to the space constraints near the high beams on Helena. So here's what I did to mount them.

  Tools of the trade:

• 5/8 spade bit
• Small drill
• File
• Marker
• Some rotary tool
• Measuring device
• Power Drill

  Materials:

• x2 85868 Dorman License and Sidemarker Socket

  I first used the small drill to make a hole roughly 25mm below the ridge on the outer ring of the high beam mount to the center of the opening I was making.

  Then, I used the spade bit at a high speed to make the 5/8 hole. The spade bit didn't care for the plastic it got stuck once it got close to popping through. I stopped short and used the rotary tool to finish the job. Its easy to do since the spade bit leaves a good spherical template to follow.

 Once you have the hole we need to make the four square openings for the pigtail lock twists. I used the rotary tool to rough them in then, I finished it off with the file to clean the edges nicely.

  Then we just need to twist our pigtail in. These Dorman ones were fairly flexible and sealed the opening well. Just be careful not to over do the opening. Erring on the side of being a little too small is better than too big in this case.

  Now I need to swap the lights and wire these up. Since the eBay specials on there have the Halos wired into the turn signals already this will hopefully not be too bad an install. More to come on that note.

These Ebay Headlights gotta go!

The headlights that came with this 328i when I bought it are, eBay specials. The manufacture on the lights is a company called: SunYan. Helena needs an eye transplant.

Cons:

• They are not DOT approved at all.
• The low beams are in protectors but, they are terrible. The fog lights are brighter than they are. 
• The plastic is faded and sun beat. Not really to any fault of the manufacturer, they just aren't glass.
• The front of the lights are starting to separate from the back of the lights on one of them. 
• The fitment is not good. Especially around the corner light area.
• The wiring adapters are pretty cheap and look rather flimsy.

Pros:

• The High Beams are bright. Non Projection helps with this I believe.
• They were probably super cost effective.
• They did come with wiring adapters. Thank God for this. No hacked wiring.
• They have H1 high and low beam bulbs.
• They have dual fluorescent halo rings, if you are into that kinda thing.

They honestly don't look that bad but, I'd like to get these off the car before they catch fire. I'm trying to cut costs and fix what really needs attention but, these lights are eating at me.

  There are several light options available for this car. The go to are Depo ZKW style headlights. These are replicas of the ZKW Euro M3 lights. They have a clear front housing and projectors in the low beams. Depo offers halos with these as well. They are glass front.

  The other option are actual ZKW Bosch Headlights. These have no halos but, do have city lights. The also have a low beam projector and glass fronts. More robust and sturdy than any of the copies.

  One of the members of the car club I'm apart of said to look into DDM Tuning. So, I did. The lights are DJ Auto style? and  are glass front. Look very similar to the Depos. They offer HID kits packaged with the headlights, halos (if that's your thing), and Lamin-X films.

  Straight from their site:

Features

• Direct replacement headlight with HIDs, optional Angel Eyes and clear Lamin-X protector
• High quality headlight housing, glass lens and wiring
• Plug-and-play adapters allow for a direct and easy installation
• Includes halogen bulbs for the high beam function at no charge
• Comes in the pair

  Pretty cool stuff. I did some looking on Yelp to see if the garage had any reviews. They are in fact on there. The reviews, at the time of this write up, were a mixture of good and bad. 63 people rating them a 2.5 star. It seems mostly because of the customer service is poor. :/ Not so good in a tough market already. So before going that route I'd like to see if I can find some locally.

     My buddy Jeremy let me know just this morning that there are two sets locally. I'm going to look in to that first.

    The tabs were indeed broken. The two on top where the head lights mount and the one had missing plastic where the track for the corner light slides in. Jeremy recommended I steer away from these as his had the same problem. He was quite unsatisfied with his.

  He then, reminded me of the stock headlights that he himself removed from his car. All he needed to do was get them from where they were stored, and I could have them. Like free? Yeah. Sweet! So...What are you waiting for? Go get them man!

A Hot Shower with Helena

I don't normally name my cars. In fact, I've never named a car. I nicknamed my hatchback Hatchy but, I never really thought of it as a name. It was just a quick way of saying: The hatchback. This one was different though. This 328 had spoken to my soul somehow. This little silver beauty, although not perfect, was exactly what I was looking for. It didn't seem fair to not give her a name. 

You can force things like names. They have to fall in place. I had talked about this same thing prior with Jeremy when we first got the car but, I wanted some time to think about it. It was time to give the poor car a good cleaning. We had taken the passenger side seat out of the car to check what color the seat reclining gear was. This allowed full access to give the carpets a good scrub and vacuuming*.

The carpet was not terrible by any means. In fact it looked as if someone may have tried cleaning the front and rear sections before. You can never get all the crevasses with the seats in though. Under the passenger seat we found where the Strawberry smell was coming from. A long forgotten scent can of the strawberry variety lay wedged under there. Yum, yum. To the trash it goes.

The smoky essence still laid thick in the black carpet. We have some really decent Enzyme cleaner called Branch Basics. My wife mixed it with some lavender essential oils so I had an ever so slight scent of that which didn't bother me. I sprayed the carpets down fairly well. Then, you wait. The buggers gotta eat for a bit. There was what looked like some soda spilled around the shoddy cup holders. I gave that one a second spray down.

I didn't have a good brush so instead I used a few microfiber towels. I wish I had taken a picture of the mess that came up out of that carpet. Blackened goop from the ages. The car was smelling fresher already. It took some time and a good bit of muscle but, the passenger side carpet was looking pretty good. 

  The inside of all the windows had that smoker haze as well. Unfortunate. Some Windex, newspaper, and more microfiber towels fixed those up as well. The other interior pieces I had touched so far were all sticky. No Windex for those of course. Again back to my enzyme cleaner. I wiped down all the dash pieces, door cards, and other assorted interior plastics. I pulled the nasty steering wheel cover off. It ripped at the seams while I tried sliding it off the wheel. It was disgusting. I cleaned the shift knob and steering wheel at least a dozen times. There was a lot of glitter on this stuff.

Everything at this point was less sticky, glittery, and smoky. Awesome! Since the car was attractive from the outside but, gross inside it got me thinking. The car wasn't old enough to be a Helga but, I liked the ring to Helena. Attractive from the outside but, scary to get into for multiple reasons... A perfect fit for my little 328. So Helena it is. I don't think I'll ever get all the glitter out either which, is kind of fitting.

Now it was time for a good shower of the outside of the little lady. After giving the car a good cleaning outside the flaws in the paint work are more noticeable. I have a few areas I need to address. Nothing major but, they stand out to me. Overall the body was in good shape for its age. It still looked clean and there was no peeling clear coat or rust. I was a proud man person standing beside my freshly washed Helena. Never mind the car was auto and the front suspension was shot. Oh and you know I tire shined the hell out of those fresh kicks!

*I honestly wish I would have shampooed the carpet. Not that its a huge deal to do at this point. Just saying.