How To Install BMW E36 Coilovers (325i, 328, M3, & More)

what's going on everybody gareth here with fcp here welcome back to another diy video today we're going to be installing this bc racing coilover kit on this e36 m3 behind me [Music] of course we do offer a bunch of different coilover options bill stein owens just to name a few outside of bc racing however this is the kit that the owner of this car chose and so we're going to go ahead and talk about how to install these coilovers on the e36 this would also apply to installing just normal shocks and struts on the 36 as well so you can use this video for general suspension installation it's gonna be mostly the same so with that said let's talk about some of the tools we're gonna need for this job and we'll go ahead and get into it so some of the tools we're gonna need for the job it's all standard metric stuff so 18 millimeter 16 millimeter and 13 millimeter those are basically all of the sizes for the bolts the mounting nuts and also the sway bar link nuts on the front however in the case of these bc racing coilovers once you get to the installation we will mention that some of those sizes do change so instead of the nuts being 16 millimeters for the sway bar links they'll be 17 and the nuts for the camber plates and rear shock mounts instead of being 13 will be 12 because they're using a different standard hardware so it's js for din so those sizes change but screwdrivers always helpful flat head a hammer sometimes the bolt that holds the strut to the knuckle the one that goes straight through at the top that could be seized in there so hammer will be useful for that but also if you have air power an air hammer will also take care of that for you some pry bars really long ratchet for breaking stubborn bolts quarter inch ratchet 16 millimeter 17 mm 18 millimeter wrenches and then your sockets same thing 12 13 16 18 millimeter some of these are in packs some of these are just chrome two torque wrenches using one that can do 100 newton meters one that could do about 25 newton meters flashlight's always useful the coilover kit comes with a five millimeter allen key and then obviously the spanner wrenches for adjusting the ride height so you want those impact gun is also useful silicone spray for getting the brake hoses and the pad wear sensor and the abs wheel speed sensor off of the bracket on the coilover but on that like i said it's all real basic hand tools you don't really need anything crazy to do this job step one we're gonna go ahead and take the wheels off well actually step one is get the vehicle supported safely in this case obviously we're using the lift if you're a home on jack stands make sure the car's level ground make sure it's steady especially don't put your body under the car if you're using a floor jack so first thing we need to do is there's a couple of electrical wires so wheel speed sensor so we just need to remove the connector from the strut along with the brake hose silicone spray will help with this but a screwdriver also works pry that out also to aid in removal here i'm actually going to disconnect the wheel speed sensor from this electrical housing here and just leave it hanging off to the side because when i bolt the strut we do need to get this kind of out from behind so it'll just be easier if it's not in the way not required to remove that i just find it easier on this setup and word of the wise these usually collect a lot of debris so if you have me under the car and you're looking up at this thing don't open it make sure that your eyes are either protected or you're just simply not opening this up with your eyes directly underneath you will regret it all right next up we're going to use a 16 mm box wrench for the counter hold and a 16 millimeter wrench to break the nut free for the sway bar link okay we're going to spray some stuff on that it's pretty dry it's pretty crusty you can use your favorite brand of rust penetrant for dry and crusty fasteners like this it's just going to make easy removal because the nuts not going to bind on the corrosion the coilover kit comes with its own sway bar links they're shorter than the factory ones so we're not going to be reusing this so i'm removing it with the strut if you're working on an e36 non-m later production the sway bar will normally be attached to the control arm with a shorter link the coilover kit that bc racing offers is just going to use the m3 style there are early production e36s that use this as well but for the most part you're just going to see e36 m3s with a sway bar look like this and most normally 36s are going to have the sway bar attached to the control arm next up we need to remove the three mounting bolts that hold the struts in the knuckle so you have these two bolts down here these are the short ones 18 millimeter and then you have a nut and a bolt at the top also 18 millimeter could use a bigger impact gun but also a really long ratchet will also do this for you as well these are lock-tited so not 100 surprised that these were tough but there's also nature's loctite in this car since this was in vermont most of its life so [Applause] you can see the redlock tight you need to replace these bolts when you do this most people don't i recommend always replacing these bolts on e36s now whenever you're doing work on a car there's always opportunity to find other things that need replacing just realize that this brake hose is not in good condition that needs to be replaced asap this car is not a daily driver so it's not a immediate safety concern but you know you're doing any kind of work on a car always take a look around you'll never know what you find there's another bolt up here these are both 18s the nut is spinning so that's good hopefully the bolt is not seized in the knuckle that does happen from time to time but we got solutions to those problems too went ahead and put the nut back on the bolt i'm just gonna go ahead and tap it with this hammer hopefully it backs out i cheated and i used this big old air hammer but the other option for this is if you have a map gas torch you can actually heat up this area right here you want to be careful because obviously it is connected to the strut uh the little bit of expansion will help you get that bolt to move once it starts to move you're pretty much good to go but uh didn't really feel like playing with fire today when i could just use this i don't know jackhammer for bolts pretty much next i'm gonna take a pry bar and we're just going to wiggle the strut off the knuckle like so it'll just drop down this is why you want to make sure that the brake hose is loose obviously this brake hose is destroyed anyway so it doesn't matter but now that this is loose down here we can go up top remove the three nuts at the top and the whole strut is out go ahead and pop this cover off that goes on top of the three nuts that hold the strut mount on this is an e36 m3 thing only normally 36s don't have this these would be pretty tricky to come off but you know i got this hand strength so there we go just pops right off next uh just three 13 millimeter nuts and that's it obviously on the last one you want to hold the strut otherwise we'll come crashing down so in this application the coilovers are directional for the front this one's labeled fr for front right the other one's labeled fl the rear is it doesn't matter but when you're installing coil overs just make sure that this is correctly installed because if you reverse them particularly this sway bar mount tab is going to be in the wrong location so just do that beforehand also you want to orient the top mount in this place which is a camber plate you want to try to get it so that it's lined up with holes in the top and we're also going to be installing these bmw reinforcement plates this will take care of the issue of the strut towers being a little bit weak it's just a little bit extra material and helps distribute the load a little bit better especially with these solid mounts they're going to transfer a lot more force back into the strut tower and like the rubber mounts which have some cushion one thing to note on these uh you will need to make a little bit of a modification notch this area out to get full camber adjustment we're not going to do that at this moment but you know if you do have camber plates like this you will have to make that modification so i went ahead and actually did a little bit of a camber adjustment i just know from having installed these style coilovers before you will need quite a bit of camber already preset so made it negative moved the lock bolts around but at this point all we're gonna do is just sort of slide this up and in let's get a couple of nuts on the top as i drop that one because would it be a video or working on a car if you didn't drop a nut or a bolt we'll go ahead and tighten these down once there's actually load on the suspension at this point we're going to go back underneath and bolt everything down to the bottom so what i'm doing here is i'm just raising up the control arm to the bottom of the strut just using this uh pole jack to do this obviously if you're on the ground you know you could use a jack floor jack to do the same thing but just trying to get this lined up with the lower mount so i went ahead and put a little bit of lickimolli uh anti-seize on this bolt put the washer on goes through here then we have another washer and nothing goes on the back side another trick especially on e36 is let's just say you maxed out your top camber plate adjustment you could take a longer mount bolt here and then use washers between the knuckle and the lower mount to get a little bit of extra camber that's a little tip install the two new lower bolts like i said these come pre-applied with loctite and they should be replaced if you're doing the the washers as camber shims you want to make sure that you get a bolt that's longer than the original one here to compensate for the amount of washers that you're using so the key to getting these three bolts in you want to start the top one you'll notice actually on this lower mount that the top hole is not perfectly rounded it's actually more like as if it was set up for eccentric that is for adjustability down here so you can get these lower bolt holes lined up once you have the bolts threaded or first couple threads are engaged you can then go ahead and tighten everything down torque to the spec it does help if you use some kind of jack to sort of support the control arm it will also help if you lengthen the shock body as well um you also have to make right height adjustments on this once it's installed so it's not really a big deal um but making the shock body longer using a jack on the control arm to sort of support the weight of everything it's going to help you get these bolts engaged torque spec on all three of these bolts is 107 newton meters this will uh move on to the rear we're going to start off by removing the lower shock mount bolts it's an 18 millimeter that actually was pretty loose that's nice make sure that you have the lower portion of the trailing arm supported because obviously the spring up here is pressing down and everything with the suspension unloaded you don't want this thing shooting down gonna pull the bolt out like that nice and simple and then we'll go ahead and lower the trailing arm with the bolts removed next up grab a big pry bar and we're gonna go ahead and leverage the spring out since there's no preload on the spring at this point good to go so this point all you have is a two 13 millimeter nuts that hold the shock in place worth noting that shock towers on e36s are extremely weak and they are known to fail so this entire panel here is actually separate from the body and you can order the replacement sheet metal for these cars so if you're doing a coil over installation or any kind of performance upgrade definitely want to take a look at the rear shock tower and if you need to replace that sheet metal now it's time to do it i actually see just a little bit of narciness there but um for the sake of the installation uh we're just gonna go ahead and install so uh yeah actually this damage right here that we see uh that is very common issue on the e36 chassis cars looks like uh the previous owner to ever purchase this car did this fix with this random i don't even know what material i guess it's some kind of steel did some kind of janky fix here but uh just so you know you can buy replacement sheet metal for this uh we actually sell those on the website and as an e36 owner myself who's trying to build a e36 track car i could tell you that is a very heavy area of focus when you're trying to build these cars so let's talk about the rear spring setup so obviously in the front it is a it is a coil over strut so it's a coilover in the rear on e36s it's a divorce setup now you can run a true rear coilover on an e36 however you need to reinforce the hell out of the rear shock towers and make it load bearing it's not load bearing traditionally so you can't just run a you know standard coilover uh basically the kit comes with a 62 millimeter id 140 millimeter long 10k spring that's the standard spring in the coilover kit spring rate in the rear is higher than the front because the spring is in board so obviously the upper control arm acts as a giant lever however you do have some ride height adjustment options for the rear so what bc racing has done is they give you two options these are the two locking rings for the rear height adjuster this would normally go on the top facing downward and so these two together would be used to basically set a ride height and lock it in place the other option is to use just one ring which would be this one max it out the other option is to not use those at all use this holley shim slide this shim all the way down the adjuster and then you have to probably machine or cut some of this ride height adjuster off to make sure that the control arm is not hitting this piece so basically you can do three different types of ride height adjustment if you use both of these obviously you can adjust if you just remove one that's going to be the lower setup this would be the max lowest that you can go with the rear with this spring now for us we're going to be installing this with the intent of actually adjusting the ride height so we're going to use both of these rings for an e36 i would normally just set these towards the middle and then go from there you can always make it go a little bit lower but the middle is always kind of a good place to start from just going to make sure that the collar is somewhat near the middle we're going to take this little spring insulator that just makes sure that it's not metal on metal because otherwise you might hear some noise from the rear this actually sits on this little rubber pad at the top i guess you could choose to remove this if you want but honestly i recommend using the rubber pad to kind of keep the noise in the rear down this is the lower pad now would be a good time to replace it obviously this mountain is not in fantastic shape you're going to take the lower spring seat that they provide kind of hooks onto this little knob here spring goes on that the adjuster goes on the top and basically it goes from top to bottom in the rear so this is you want the adjuster at the top that way you can actually get to it we're going to take our little rubber shim that has this triangular point or cone point that's going to be facing upward that goes on the upper control arm here our spring adapter goes on like that we then take the coil spring i like to make sure that the numbers are actually facing outward so you ever wanted to order a new spring or know the length of your spring you can easily see it then we have our adjuster stack and shim that goes on top now obviously this went in a lot easier than the other one came out the spring is obviously shorter but this also has a much higher spring rate than the factory spring so it is shorter so it makes installation a little bit easier and also note that the suspension still is a droop without the shock being installed so the trick to installing shocks on any e36 or even e46 for that matter is to have a friend in the trunk of the car putting the nuts on as you slide the shock up through the shock mount otherwise i don't i mean i guess you could try to do something like this but you gotta have some long arms and very flexible which i'm not so so now we're just gonna go ahead and tighten these shock mount nuts down obviously we put the reinforcement plate on that is a recommendation actually even in general even on a stock car to use these shock tower reinforcement plates it'll help prevent what happened to that shock tower but like i said e36 is not surprised to see that shock tower failure so one thing to know about right height adjustment on these bc racing coilovers really any coilover of this particular style there's no helper spring in the rear and the shock body has an adjustable mount on it so hypothetically let's just say this right here is the correct adjustment for the spring and we're happy with this the key is most people at this point would take the shock and bolt into the trailing arm they make the adjustment and be good to go well the way that bc raising wants you to do this is they want you to actually preload the spring it is a fixed rate spring so it doesn't matter that if it is under tension or not the spring rate remains the same so you want to try to compress this spring roughly 10 millimeters obviously i'm using a pole jack for this so we'll compress the spring that'll basically set it up so that when i adjust the height of the lower shock mount at full suspension droop the spring won't rattle around or make any noises that's critical because if you just leave it like this with some suspension droop and you bolt this up every time the suspension unloads you're going to hear the spring in the in the back rattle around the whole point of preloading the spring and the same in the front although that's a little bit different process is to make sure the spring doesn't have a chance to move around or come loose from its mount so we're going to call that roughly 10 mil you don't want to compress it too much because then at that point you're obviously affecting suspension travel so as you can see i can actually change the length of the shock and by changing the length of the shock absorber that's going to allow us to properly pre-load the spring and get it to line up with the trailing arm bolt hole which is a critical part of adjusting the right height of the suspension my trick on this is is to not bolt the shock right away is to adjust the ride height via the spring because that's ultimately what dictates the ride height for the rear suspension and then go ahead and bolt the shock once you pre-loaded the rear spring and obviously they max out how short these mounts can or how long how low these mounts can be to fit everything in a smaller box so there is quite a bit of adjustment even in a divorce setup like this so you can get the preload of the rear suspension proper so as i move the pole jack out you saw that the rear suspension didn't really drop that much like i said that's because essentially by setting the preload of the spring and setting the length of the shock that's how you're also adjusting a rear suspension droop once you've done that bring the lower lock ring down and you want to jam it in place against this mount you can also see how it's got this bevel cut that's so it basically when you put it into the lower mount as a jam nut it doesn't have the opportunity to move torque spec for our lower shock mount bolts is 100 newton meters and you want to do you want to make sure that you torque this at right height because you want to pre-load the bushing in the lower shock mount so the hardware included with the bc racing coilovers it's probably a js standard as opposed to din so these are 12 millimeter nuts instead of 13 however the torque spec is going to be the same it's an m8 thread size so i'm going for 25 millimeters so next up we need to install the included sway bar link with the kit for reference you cannot use a factory sway bar link for the setup the tab is in a different location on the lower mount so therefore the link has to be shorter so you have to use the included sway bar links so just a matter of getting everything lined up they give you these washers which i'm going to use on the front where the stud goes through and then they give you these uh 17 millimeter nylock nuts so it's a five millimeter counter hold so the five millimeter allen key they give you for the camber plates also works for these which is convenient just in case you don't have to have a five millimeter allen key or allen socket i don't think it's a coincidence that they made both a five millimeter size and then i'm gonna go ahead and just loosely put the nut here at the top with the washer on the outside where the stud goes through so we keep that in place i'm just gonna go ahead and tighten this nut like i said five millimeter counter hold there we go lower the car a little bit and get the top nut at the strut mount and unfortunately because of how this tab is constructed you can't use a ratcheting wrench on this so you're gonna have to use the box end of a wrench and just tighten it into place fortunately the night locks not that tight so i suppose if you wanted to you could turn the allen counter hold however if you were to turn the counter hole and basically spin the stud of the ball joint while holding the nut you do risk potentially ripping the ball joint boot so i recommend doing it this way size is the same up front so it's a 12 millimeter socket 25 newton meters is the torque going for obviously the car is back down on the ground to do this which makes the most amount of sense because all the vehicle weight is going to be on the strut mounts and the shock mount so you actually be able to torque them properly all right so the one thing that we didn't really touch base in this video was how to properly adjust the ride height of coilovers if that's a video that you'd be interested in seeing at some point let us know we'd be happy to do a video dedicated specifically to that but the big things to take away when you're adjusting the right hand on any coilover is to make sure that you're always measuring from a consistent point that you're recording the changes that you make and the effect that it has on ride height so you have an existing log of the changes that you made and what the final results are going to be another thing to mention is over the course of a couple of weeks driving the car the suspension will settle a little bit so that ride height is going to change slightly which is why it's really important to write down this information have it because if the suspension were to settle a little bit and lower a little bit more than you desire you want to bring it back up to the right height you originally had when you made the original change or when you were happy with the final setup having that information should be really useful to get you back to that point so keep in mind this will probably be an ongoing process for the first couple of weeks of ownership once you install the coilovers but once everything is settled down over those first couple of weeks you get the proper alignment ready to go you're not going to have to make these changes really at any point again in the future of course there's many ways to go about doing this if you want to do a corner balance for example that's going to take a lot more expertise you might need to take it to a shop obviously you need scales and things like that the other thing is if you're just strictly looking for a proper ride height the important thing is to make measurements have all the information recorded and to be happy with the final results so as you can see it's really not that difficult job to do coilover installation here on the z36 like i said in the beginning this video this information can be used for installing just normal struts and shocks as well as springs it's really not that difficult of a process it's really not that many tools involved it's pretty straightforward everything is pretty much right there in front of you obviously we found a lot of other things working on this specific car but this is a project vehicle so it is going to be a little bit rough around the edges and those things are going to be addressed over time so for those of you that saw these issues and you're worried about that don't worry about the cars not being driven anyway i hope you learned something in this video if you have any questions or comments leave in the comment box below we'll make sure we get back to you hit that like button so that we know you like these videos uh we have plenty more diy content on the way so also hit the subscribe button and as always we'll see you for the next one thank you for watching

Channel: FCP Euro

Views: 62,631

Keywords: coilover install, e36 coilover, lowering springs, automobile lowering, 3 series, e36 drift car, drift build, bmw drift car, e36 drift, e36 drift build, lowering springs vs coilovers, e36 coilovers, e36 coilovers bc, e36 coilover adjustment, e36 coilover review, e36 coilover kit, e36 coilover spring rates, e36 m3 drift car, bc coilovers, bc coilovers review, bc coilovers adjustment, bc coilovers install, bmw bc racing coilovers, bmw bc coilovers, bc racing coilovers

Id: HL_Xk2JS02E

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020