Replacing suspension bushings (nightmare)

[UK_325ti]

Hi all, not posted in a while. My appologies as this is probably listed somewhere else in this forum. My car recently failed its annual inspection due to "excessive play on the right front wheel" my garage quoted me £60 to fix this but having practically rebuilt my TI allready i thought i would undertake the task myself so i set off to replace the bushings. My first mistake when undertaking this task was to order oem bmw replacements as there are easier fit ones available, thought i doubt this makes much of a difference. this job is made much easier / possible by the use of a hydraulic press, i eventually tracked down a friendly local garage that allowed me to use theirs i dont advise attempting this with a vice as i bent the tightening bar on my vice this way. i also destroyed the ball joint connecting the arm to the hub and so have replaced these also. Finally i got everything back together both sides completed and as i was tightening up the suspension arm to the subframe i seem to have cross threaded the bolt / shaft and as this is part of the arm itself that pretty much requires me to start the entire process again. (not pleased) tomorrow i will remove the arm and see if i can sort the thread out with it off the car. Been without car for almost 2 weeks now due to delays on this job and am rather frustrated about it. I have decided that i will be re-doing all this work in a couple of months as i already had planned to replace the shocks for some lower harder ones to reduce body roll. I have also spotted that you can get slightly off centered bushings that increase the caster (M-tech) if anybody has any experience of this change, is it just the bushings or is there more to it than that and does it make any noticeable driving change? Anyway thanks for reading my rant and to summarise i have now spent lots more than originally quoted have wasted lots of time and will probably end up doing it again. My advice is to avoid replacing your own suspension bushings. on the plus i have replaced 4 bushings rather than the garage that would have probably only replaced 1, 2 at best.

[mohaughn]

Replacing front suspension bushings is easy. The thing that you did wrong was just trying to replace the bushings, and not replacing the control arms and ball joints at the same time. The easiest and quickest, and probably least expensive is to get control arms that already have new ball joints pressend into them, and then buy your LCAB bushings. This way you don't have to mess with a press or anything like that, and don't have to be concerned about damaging the ball joints when you remove the control arms from the car.