I have gotten sick of the front ride height as it was too low for daily driving.
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
This is the E36 camber plate. This has a top bearing which I will completely discard. The studs were knocked out with a hammer
Bearing removed.
Plate mocked up on an old e8x/e9x top mount
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. This took forever due to the cutout in the middle of the plate. An interrupted cut is very hard on this small lathe. Although I had botched the first set of plates, luckily the old scrapped plates were a perfect way to clamp the new plates onto the lathe.
My new plates
The assembled kit. Longer countersunk M8 bolts and new nuts were purchased to accommodate the thicker assembly.
Measuring up how much lift i will get. The plates are 9mm in thickness and I installed the top mount renforcement plate from an e92 (3.5mm), resulting in around 12.5mm of lift.
Strut assembly how it was, very dirty:
Used a custom 13mm crowsfoot socket to disassemble/assemble the camber plate and spacer plates. This was constructed by using a 13mm ring spanner cut off and welded to a socket adapter
Strut assembly cleaned with spacer attached
Before:
After:
