I have been working on installing this today and have run into a snag.
I recently had the local BMW dealer do the repairs for some seriously mushroomed shock towers. They then performed an alignment to minimize negative camber as the mushroomed towers had led to the inside edge of the front tires wearing very quickly. Now I obviously don't want to screw up that alignment, but I don't see any other way to make these plates fit as they are.
The last picture shows the nick where the inner lip of the plate is contacting the lip on the strut tower. I'm thinking I'll try to drill out the bolt holes a bit larger and see if that fixes it since ECS offered the awesome help of "lay it flat and torque it down."
And before anyone says it, yes, I should have gone with a used OEM bar._a_
Yes, it's not a good idea to mess with the alignment.
I think there are two available options:
1. Send back the bar.
2. Modify the bar plates to fit the strut bolts. You can extend one of the holes in this plate using a round file or a drill bit as you intend. Ghetto fit, but will work. This bar is not expensive, so no great harm done.
By removing the nuts, you already screwed up the alignment. Now your toe will also be off. Need an alignment anyway now (unless you marked the location before you removed the nuts.)
I saw someone remove them once and the strut under tension sprung outwards. its the natural tendency of the strut. Unless OP took pics or made markings before and after i wouldn't be sure. the slightest movement will throw off the alignment.
as you can see, OP's strut is pushed all the way out. was it like that before??
Yes, I took pictures of the nut locations before I loosened anything just in case they were to slip for some reason. They were set all the way out like that when the alignment was done and I'm not about to try to pry them in just to make this bar fit. The plates are aluminum so I'm going to try to elongate the holes with a round file.
Ran into this today putting mine on. Did some more investigating on mine, and found that because of some of the worn pieces, the previous owner must've gone to an alignment shop that just popped the rear mount over a notch instead of fixing everything else first. Since I'm going in for an alignment early next week, and since everything is going to get replaced this weekend beforehand, I pried it back into position and bolted the bar on. If it's still not close enough to be aligned properly when we go do it, then I'll probably do as the OP and stretch the holes a little to fit it. But with the way my car was, I'm betting that when all is buttoned up, It'll align pretty darn close where it's at. We'll see.
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