Hello all,

So I just finished the left side. Changed everything, front and back control arms, stabiliser link and inner+outer tie rod. Extremely tiring to do, not hard, but all the nuts are crazy hard to remove ahah, and my air gun decided to leak air so a bit useless. Also putting T30 with this kind of torques is really.. not smart ahah. I broke the torx end 2 times

Anyway, tomorrow i'll do the right side, and go to the alignment shop saturday. As advised, I measured the lenght of the rod so i can drive safely to the shop.

However, I noticed that when turning the wheel (not by the steering but by pushing the wheels), it's comes to a hard point when tires are straight and then it's very hard to push all the way to the right. By the steering wheel it's fine no hard points. A bit weird, i'll see tomorow when i'll change the parts of the right side .

i'm a bit frustrated because I can't seem to find out how to torque the screws on the knuckle side, it's making thesteering turn as I can't hold them with the torx holes. Any tips ?

i'll put pics tomorrow
Bye!

 

Hey guys,

Just finished the job. Alignment tomorrow, the car doesn't drive straitght at all the steering is approx 10° from the center to drive straight. i don't know what i missed in the measuring of the tie rods but it's fine.

I have this message "drive control system, drive moderately" on the screen, with this triangle on the dashboard. I think it's due to the bad alignment, right ? I'll reset the sensor afterwards.

By the way, to torque the screws on the knucle, I just elevated it. It was much simpler. Same for unscrewing. With the weight it didn't turn

 

I'm not entirely sure which bolts you're referring to, but the Torx head is only there to prevent the shaft from spinning when you're tightening down the nut that goes around it. There shouldn't be a lot of torque on the Torx tool unless something is seized (which can happen - but it sounds like this happened on re-installation of new hardware / bolts / nuts / etc.).

IMPORTANT that you don't tighten down any of the bolts holding the bushings (rubber bits) with the wheels dangling. That will place the bushings under tremendous stress 100.00% of the time, leading to their imminent failure, and possibly wonky handling / "road feel". Tighten these bolts only with the wheels / hubs at "regular ride height" (I use a small floor jack under the knuckles to do this step).

It's really easy to get the alignment of the steering wheel off - easy enough to adjust but really fiddly if you don't have the right equipment. If that's ALL that's off, it should drive just fine, though perhaps that's the source of the iDrive error message. Generally, to re-center the steering wheel, you need to figure out which tie rod is "long" and which is "short", and adjust the same number of turns (or partial turns) out of the adjusters (one each way). That won't change the way the car drives other than to move the steering wheel. As I'd mentioned, you can check your toe-in by measuring from one groove on one of the front tires to the same groove on the other front tire - measuring front and rear of the front tire (as high as you can, working around the chassis being in the way), and comparing the two numbers. Adjust until they're the same, and you've set the toe-in to zero, which is plenty close for driving to your alignment shop (even if it's a reasonably long drive).

 

Thanks for your help habbyguy!

What I was meaning is that even though those torx are just here to counter the knuckle rotation, they basically face the opposite torque of the nuts holding the control arms and outer tie rod to the knuckle.

Yes to tighten the bushings I used a jack to elevate the knuckle and arms to vehicle position! Don't want to twist those new bushings!

Okay, well I really hope this Idrive message is due to the -really- bad alignment. The knuckle dropped on the right side when I tried to lower it to take out the control arm, but everything is OK, especially the brake lines and abs sensor
I'll try to adjust it with your advice. I have seen people doing it with a rope, what do you think of that?
I only measured the tie rods before installing it by the way but I think I missed something aha


Edit : just finished the pseudo-alignment with your technique. Has to drop the engine cover to find some referential points. Well, had to turn the tie rod a lot ahaha, I had like 3cm of difference on the right and 1.5 on the left. It's much better while driving. No error message
I'll tell you tomorrow after the final alignment of the woobbles still occur.

Thanks again mate

 

Hello all
Alignment done values where slightly out of tolerances

However, I still have wobbles at around 89 km/h the exact same ones I had previously. I don't know what to do now ahah I changed everything

At least I do not have thumping noises while braking anymore

Here is a short clip :

 

Does it wobble at 120kph+

 

>Hello,
No, only from 80 to 95/105. Sometimes it stops by itself

The shop balanced the wheel too

 

If it goes away then I would say it points to a tire/wheel issue. The worst thing is finding a steering wheel wobble when a balance has been done. In your instance you know your tires are old. How old? Was your wheel lugs torqued to spec. I had an issue with my E60 and it ended up being a torque issue. I just removed the tires and reinstalled torquing to spec. You also can have a rust issue. The hub lip the wheel and rotor sits on sometimes do not let the two sit on the hub correctly thus causing a vibration/wobble issues. Remove a wheel and see if it is in bad shape. You may need to remove the wheel and rotor and take a wire brush to it. Just a few ideas to help out.

 

Well i would say the tires are 5+ years old. The 35k service has been done in 2015 so the car hasn't moved a lot since... it's 60k kms now.

When i removed the wheels for the first time, to switch front/rear, they were pretty hard to remove. I ended up hitting them all around the tire.
And yeah everything is torqued to spec, i saw the guy at the shop with it torque wrench doing it.

There is some rust yeah, i'll try removing the wheel and brush the part where wheel sits. Thanks for the advice. I know it's hard to diagnose a problem only with words but i'm pretty frustrated now that i changed all theses parts

how can i easily check for a bent rim ?

 

They should of seen that when they did the balance. Put it in the air and turn it. You should see inconsistencies in the rotation. That's old but my current tires are 7 years old and I've only put around 20k miles on them. They are Michelins so they are holding up.