The Cart Before the Horse: Spec 3 Build

[Senor_Taylor]

Trying to avoid the micro updates. My limiters go in tonight and the rest of my parts and my air bag tool get here tomorrow. I'm getting the car titled hopefully on Monday and I hope to get it inspected next weekend.





At Jake's request, here's another RTAB Horror story from me. As you all know by now, RTABs are my arch nemesis. My disaster shit pile E46 I bought from Chan for like $12 and a pack of gum needed RTABS desperately a week before the car show my Junior year so I attempted to tackle it in the parking lot at Copper with no tools, no experience, and no day light. I was working on this during what little time I had between class and work and it was a complete mess. I broke a million tools, got yelled at by Copper Beech for working on my car, and ended up destroying my back and having a piece of my trailing arm permanently lodged in my left thumb.

Last year, I knocked out Jake's RTABs on his E46 in like an hour, so I was feeling confident this time. I borrowed the special tool from Christina and got started.



You may not be able to tell, but the "old" style bushings have a rim around the outside that makes them larger in diameter and a lot harder to remove without a specialty tool. The tool consists of a U Shaped piece of metal, a thread rod, and a metal block. You thread the rod through the bushings, place the block on the other side of the bushing on the rod, then place the U shaped piece on the rod on the outside of the bushing. You double nut the rod and turn it to pull the block towards the U shaped piece and pull the bushing out of the trailing arm.

Like I previously said, I blew out my back trying to turn my ratchet using a similar tool I made out of a ball joint kit the first time I did this in 2015, so this time, I figured I'd use an impact. The drive side came out in less than 15 seconds, honestly. I was very very pleased. Zach got back from Starbucks and I triumphantly held up the bushing in my hand showing my prize.



I walked around the car to get started on the other side. I thread the rod through, attached the blocks, and hit it with the impact. The bushing started to inch its way out of the trailing arm, then suddenly it stopped. I let off the impact and soon found that the block, and the double nuts had cross threaded and seized to the threaded rod. I spent the next hour trying to get one or the other to thread off the rod so I could at least get the tool out of the bushing and ended up snapping the rod in half. This at least allowed me to get the rod out of the bushing. The bushing itself was 1/4 of the way out.



I gave up, went upstairs and let off some steam and complained in the group chat. I punished my already empty wallet more and ordered a new $100 tool from Bimmerworld to give it back to who I borrowed it from, waited a few hours and went back down to the garage. I started to sand the inside of the trailing arm on the driver side and figured I'd take a shot at pressing in the new bushing with the tools I had. I placed some zip ties around the outside of the bushing to keep it from mushrooming as I pressed it in and coated the outside with dish soap. I repurposed some parts from my ball joint kit and salvaged the now bent, stripped rod with the block fused to it and made a new tool that allowed me to pull the bushing in 3/4 of the way, which was enough for me to make another tool from parts of my ball joint kit. This tool was a large C Clamp, with a round place on the end of the rod. The other end had a large cup slightly larger than the diameter of these new bushings so I could push the bushing through the arm and not have it bind as it came out the other side. At this point, Tyler came down to the garage and helped me with this process.

Feeling a second wind of energy, Tyler and I vowed to get the other bushing out that night if it killed us. We spent probably 30 minutes heating the trailing arm and trying to flatten the rim on the outside of the bushing so we could use the new tool I had made (The cup is big enough to fit over the new style bushing, but not the old style with that extra rim). We didn't have much success here, so we then decided to drill out the rubber of the bushing to feed a hand saw through and cut the inner sleeve out, then fit a sawzall in to cut the outside of the bushing and chisel it out. This also was a failed attempt as it proved more difficult than we anticipated. At this point, I was ready to go nuclear and decided to cut the flange off of the bushing with an angle grinder so our tool would fit over it. Tyler, for some reason, left me unsupervised as I started contorted myself under the car, wedged between the wall of my garage that's only 6 inches away from rear quarter panel, angle grinder in hand.

What happened next still amazes me. After about 30 seconds of cutting with the wheel... the bushing just falls out. It literally just fell out. I have no idea why it decided to do that then, but after a combined 4 hours of hammering, drilling, chiseling, heating, pulling, etc... it just fell out. Pressing the new bushing was trivial at this point and we wrapped up quickly. My only regret is that I nicked the inside of the trailing arm with the drill, but It's not going to affect anything and I'll probably forget I did it.