Things started looking pretty decent after a couple hours of laying under the car with wire brushes, towels, degreasing sprays, and other cleaning/polishing tools.

Lots of dirt and grime have accumulated under there in 20+ years of road use! It’s crucial to get the areas where the plates mate with the chassis completely clean and ground down to bare metal.Īfter some degreasing with Simple Green and time with a wire brush mounted on my drill, I was very pleased to see that I had no visible cracks in any of the chassis mounting locations! I was actually a little surprised by this as I’ve heard that others out there had cracks even though they’d never raced their vehicle.

The picture above shows a view from laying on the ground and looking up at what I saw once I got everything out of the way. I ended up purchasing online through AKG Motorsport as they had a great Black Friday deal and a couple other small parts that I needed for other projects.Īs I noted in my last post, I completely dropped the rear suspension and subframe in order to swap in a new differential and upgrade the main replaceable rear bushings. Since all BMW vendors use the same plates (to my knowledge), it doesn’t matter who you purchase through, you can just target the best price.

They are actually used in the factory/dealer repair of cracked E36 chassis mounting locations so BMW knows that this is an issue with the car. The actual reinforcement steel stampings are manufactured by BMW, not third party sources. Each of these steps can take a fair amount of time to complete properly. The only issues with reinforcing the chassis are getting everything disassembled, prepped and attaching the reinforcements properly. Here are some examples of the damage that can occur in a BMW E36 chassis without reinforcement: These four points can transmit a lot of force to the chassis and cause cracks to develop that require extensive work to properly repair. I’ve highlighted the four rear subframe mounting locations where it attaches to the chassis. The rear subframe of the BMW E36 chassis provides mounting points for the suspension and the rear differential as seen in the picture above. In this post, I’ll discuss how I reinforced my E36 rear subframe mounting locations through bonding (not welding) in BMW factory steel stampings. At least one large area still exists though, and it is much more difficult to address. I previously took care of one prone area, the rear shock mounts, when I added the complete Ground Control Suspension kit. Racing a normal road-going car with stiffer suspension puts more stress onto the chassis than it was originally designed and this can cause cracks to develop near suspension mounting points.

E46 m3 subframe reinforcement epoxy