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      03-02-2017, 06:32 PM   #116
vtl
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Drives: 2008 BMW 135i MT
Join Date: Apr 2015
Location: Melbourne, Australia

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The front of the car is too low with the bilstein B12 kit. Steep driveways and speed bumps are getting to be annoying.

Currently the front suspension top hat has a dinan camber plate, which is 6.35mm (1/4) thick, which raises the car by that amount. What I need is a little more ground clearance, 10-15mm should help a lot.

After some pondering about the problem, I decided I needed a spacer on the top hat to raise the ride height. Theres a BMW rough road package spacer for exactly this purpose, but it is quite expensive and raises the front by 20mm, which is a bit too high for my application. Alternatively I could buy a raw aluminium billet and machine a spacer plate out from scratch, but I wasn't too keen on that idea as it would take me a long time on my little lathe.

After some research I discovered a camber plate for e36 which looked like it would be perfect for the application. The only question was whether the top hat has the same bolt pattern as e8x/9x. I have some e92 top hats at home and measured the distance between bolts and put that measurement into a calculator which would determine the bolt circle size. After searching online, I found a mechanical drawing of an e36 top hat which matched up with e92 exactly!

I purchased the E36 camber plates from here for $59:

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/251507441...%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

These plates can be used as is once the bearing has been disassembled. For my car i didn't want the extra material in the middle cos of my OCD so I wanted to machine out the bore so it looks nice an clean. This will also be helpful in allowing the top mounts to be accessible if I ever want to disassemble or install coilovers with strut adjustments. My initial attempts failed and resulted in the part flying out of the chuck on my lathe. 2nd attempt took a while but finally got it all machined.

The plates are 9mm in thickness and I will install the top mount renforcement plate from an e92, resulting in around 12mm of lift.

Looking forward to not scraping as much on steep driveways
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