Front control arms/ball joints

[mohaughn]

So it looks like my suspension upgrades may start sooner than I thought. I'm having a safety inspection done on my car today before taking it out to Sebring and my mechanic found that the stock front ball joints are failing.

So if I'm going to be replacing the ball joints, I figure I should just upgrade the entire front control arms to the meyle control arms with the heavy duty full metal ball joints included.

If I get the bavauto kit for 99$ is there anything else that I should be doing at the same time? I'm thinking there are bushings in there that should be replaced as well. I see on DustinT's sig that he is using the M3 lcab's. Is this the standard recommendation in the group?

Anybody know where to get the meyle(is this the same as mehle??) heavy duty control arms, ball joints and bushings cheaper than bavauto?

[cali-ti]

the m3 bushings are solid (unlike the stock ti ones). you can get offset (increase caster a bit by pushing the wheels slightly forward) or centered (like stock). 95 m3 bushings are offset, 96-99 m3 bushings are centered.

[mohaughn]

Awesome.. I see that bimmerworld has the control arms for the same price as bavauto, and the offset bushings for 69$ for a pair.

Looking through the other threads I see my mechanic is inline with what other people have paid to have these replaced. Ahh the joys of having older cars...

Has anybody on here done this themselves?

http://www.dol.net/~stimpee/carmrepl.htm

That site makes it look pretty easy. One of the my coworkers has the pickle fork to remove the old ball joints. Might be an easy way to save 200 and learn something new.