The Cart Before the Horse: Spec 3 Build

[Senor_Taylor]

2 ball joints per front control arm (you can press E30 M3 ball joints in E36 M3 arms, but you don’t have the arms to begin with)
2 ball joints in rear per side for upper and lower arms
RTABs and corresponding reinforcement washers

Those are all critical, no ifs and or buts. If you are in there though... might as well do subframe bushings/ sway bar reinforcement/ rtab reinforcement and diff bushings. This is assuming this is the car you are taking to race. If not just do bushings/ball joints and watch those areas carefully. RTaB failure is what demolished my E46..

I didn't see the reinforcements in the rules. I'll read again though, I probably missed them.

Your pocket welds failed though, right? I can't imagine the bushing itself failing could do that except for the bolt also shearing. Right? Scary.

Spec3 requires M3 front control arms, so my thought was to just buy those and put them on now, but Simon pointed out that I could do it cheaper now since I'll probably wear out this stuff by the time I go racing. In that case, it would make sense to press on the inner and outer ball joints and a new CAB while I'm under there doing the tie rods.

The front suspension, I'm fine with redoing, but I don't want to put anything in the rear that won't be legal when it comes to spec3. Maybe I'm over thinking it and should just focus on the immediate future here. Anything that will wear out in 2-3 seasons, I'm fine with it not being spec legal. Anything that may last longer than that, I'd rather do it once and do it the spec3 way.

The "ball joints" in the trailing arms are just bushings on the lateral link thing, right?

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so square 17x8.5 K1s? offset?

I don't know the offset yet. I'll know once I have the car at my house, hopefully this weekend. I'm going to test fit them on the GTI before anything, then I think Scott has dibs if he wants them. I can't find any photos of these on GTIs.

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