The 30th Anniversary: That’s Sway Bars, Right?
BMWs, particularly 2002s, have been a near-constant presence in the last 32 years of my life. When Maire Anne and I drove to the Weminuche Wilderness in Colorado in 1982 and hiked up over the Continental Divide, where I pulled my grandmother’s ring out of my pocket and asked her to marry me, it was my Malaga ’73 Malaga 2002 that brought us to the trailhead.
When we got married in Ipswich Massachusetts in 1984, it was my ’75 2002, Bertha, covered in shaving cream and trailing a cacophony of cans, that took us away to begin our married life.
So this year, when my cousin threw us a party for our 30th anniversary just before Labor Day, it seemed fitting that a 2002 should ferry us to and from this watershed event. Fitting was in fact the problem: Ethan, Kyle, and Kyle’s girlfriend, Katie, needed to ride with us. Sure, they could’ve crammed in the back seat, but I, the Guy With Seven BMWs, had other options.
Enter the Bavaria (which would be, by the way, the best Bruce Lee movie ever). It seemed unnecessarily narrow of me to force the kids into the back of one vintage BMW when another vintage BMW was more spacious, offered a more comfortable ride, and had a presence and elegance in harmony with the auspicious event: a grown-up vintage BMW for grown-ups.
Plus, I really like the Bavaria. I’ve been bombing around in it virtually non-stop, with a Cheshire-cat grin on my face, since I got it on the road—so much, in fact, that I’d just purchased a new set of sway bars for it.
After buying the Bav and sorting it out this year, I discovered that it was remarkably quiet and rattle-free, but it was a bit floaty and boaty at speed. When I went to BMW CCA Day at the Lars Anderson Museum of Transportation in Boston last month, I swapped notes with the other Bavaria owner there, who said, “Well, it probably doesn’t even have a rear sway bar in it.” I crawled beneath the Bavaria, and by golly, he was right.
I read on www.e9coupe.com that the same Suspension Techniques 52015 sway bar set (25 mm in the front, 22 mm in the rear) that fits the E9 3.0CS and the E12 5 Series also fits the Bavaria. I realized that these are, in fact, the same sway bars that I installed in my ’73 3.0CSi over twenty years ago, and I love the way they knock down the body roll with virtually no other negative effects. While we were on vacation, I put in the order.
It was by utter coincidence that the big box with the Suspension Techniques sway-bar set arrived at my door the day before our 30th anniversary. I joked with Maire Anne. “Your present is here,” I said. “I wanted to gift-wrap it, but I don’t have enough paper. The 30th anniversary is sway bars, right?”
This is something of a running joke with us. Professionally, she is the Bug Lady, running an insect-related educational business called Bugworks. For one anniversary many years ago, I bought her a Mexican red-kneed tarantula, asking, “The twelfth is arachnids, right?”
I told Maire Anne that I wanted the five of us to drive up to our 30th-anniversary party in the Bavaria. I told her that I wanted to get the new sway bars installed. I told her that it would be no big deal. Despite everything we had to do that weekend, she didn’t bat an eyelash—because she loves me.
With that preamble, it’s clear that this plan had the potential to not end well.
Since the Bavaria didn’t originally have a rear sway bar, it was the rear installation I expected to cause problems. But that end was trivial; all the necessary mounting points were there. I needed only to unclip the emergency-brake cables from their little wire hangers and drop them down about another inch so they cleared the bar.
It was the front bar that caused all the problems.
The front sway-bar mounting bracket attaches to the forward-most point of the front subframe. There’s a tab at the front of the bracket that slides into a slot; the bracket squeezes a urethane bushing around the sway bar. The back of the bracket has a hole in it, through which a bolt goes, allowing attachment to the subframe. Put the tab in the slot, rotate the back of the bracket down, bolt it in place. Simple—exactly like the rear bracket.
The problem is that, unlike on the rear, on the front there’s not enough space to rotate the back of the bracket before it hits the front frame rail. So rather than putting the front tab in its slot and rotating the back of the bracket down, you have to try to jigger it all in sideways. This is easy when reinstalling the original sway-bar brackets, because the stock bar is small and the bushings are old and compressed, but with a brand-new big bar and urethane bushings, it’s damn near impossible.
The trick is to loosen the front subframe bolts and lower the entire subframe to create a gap between it and the frame rails; this gives the back of the brackets room to rotate. Obviously, you need to be very, very careful not to loosen the bolts so much that the subframe becomes detached; these bolts and the subframe are, after all, bearing the full weight of the engine. But by loosening one bolt all the way with the others still tightened, then threading that bolt in several full turns, and measuring the clearance with a ruler, you can see how much bolt you have to work with, and loosen the others to drop the subframe and create the necessary clearance. (I also lightly support the subframe with a floor jack, just in case I’m wrong.)
But even after I tried this trick, the back of the brackets didn’t have enough space to clear; they still hit the frame rails and couldn’t be rotated into place. I placed them side-by-side with the old brackets, and noted that the new brackets were longer in the back than the originals—far longer than they needed to be, with nearly ¾" of metal protruding past the mounting holes. I band-sawed one of them short, and in a minute I was able to get the front tab in the slot and rotate the back into position. Nearly home free! Just need to put the bolts in place!
Unfortunately, the bolts didn’t fit.
That is, the holes in the brackets didn’t line up with the mounting holes in the subframe. Puzzled, I again put the old and new brackets side-by-side. Sure enough, the holes in the new brackets were in a different place.
Well, no big deal; I’ll just drill new holes in the brackets. But what I thought would’ve taken five minutes took over an hour, as this was more like elongating the existing holes than drilling new ones. A drill is not a milling machine; you can’t just move a drill bit sideways to elongate a hole. Get impatient with it, and you break drill bits and cause the thing you’re drilling to grab, rotate, and send you to the emergency room. I finally finished it off with a round file and a Dremel tool.
By now, night had fallen, and Maire Anne and I still had had any number of things to do before the big event the following day. I had spent four hours installing sway bars, and I wasn't finished. She didn’t say anything—she never does; she’s a saint—but there are limits, and I was pushing them.
However, I put one of the brackets in place, poked a screwdriver through the holes to check alignment, and—ta-daaa!—they lined up. Okay, just put these bolts back in, tighten the nuts on ’em, and we’re done.
Nope.
Again, because of the new thicker urethane bushings, the back of the brackets wouldn’t squeeze down far enough for the tips of the bolts to show enough thread to allow the nuts to bite. I tried squeezing the back of the brackets down with giant pliers, but I simply could not make it work.
Okay, this is stupid. Concentrate! All I need is a longer bolt. Unfortunately, these are metric Allen-head bolts; the head of the bolt sits up inside a little circular recess. A standard hex-head bolt won’t work. So I don’t just need a longer bolt, I need a longer 8-mm Allen-head bolt. Not the sort of thing you pick up at Home Depot at 8:00 p.m.
After 32 years of wrenching on BMWs, I have a pretty good-sized bolt bucket. I emptied much of it into a box and parsed through it, but I could not find what I was looking for. I tried to picture Allen-head bolts on BMWs: Where else other than Bavaria sway-bar brackets? Half shafts? Nope: too long and too narrow. Still, the bolt size seemed familiar. I knew I had some somewhere.
Finally it came to me: This size bolt is used to hold the shift-tower bushings to the back of the transmission. I must have a ton of them! But where were they—and are they in fact longer? I pulled out several boxes of shifter-and-transmission parts, and found some 8-mm Allen head bolts. To my delight, they were slightly longer than the sway-bar-bracket bolts. They were perfect. I installed them in a matter of minutes.
Greasy, sweaty, exhausted, ebullient, and victorious, I staggered into the house. “I got your present installed,” I said to Maire Anne.
“Oh, were we exchanging gifts?” she joked. “And I didn’t get you anything.”
“You know that all I want is you,” I said for easily the ten-thousandth time in our relationship.
The next day, the five of us piled into the Bavaria and drove up to my cousin’s house for our 30th-anniversary party. “You folks are okay with a few tail-out power slides to check whether I have the sway bars dialed in correctly, right?” I asked. (Seriously, I behaved. I waited until I was alone in the car to nail and wail.)
The party was perfect—just our families, and one close friend who had been my best man. I did enjoy the Bavaria’s role in ferrying us up and back, but it was a bit player, as well it should’ve been. When we arrived home, I saw Maire Anne in her pretty white dress, bathed in evening light, in the front seat of the Bavaria, balancing a bouquet of flowers between her knees. All that is right about my life seemed summed up in that moment.
A part of me wants to strain for some metaphor tying sway bars in with smoothing out the bumps in the ride of life, but really, it doesn’t work. That would be shocks. Improving the handling on the ride of life? Springs. Sway bars for your marriage. Reducing the roll of life. Keeping it level. Too awkward. We’ll let this one go.
Let’s just say I hope you all find a life partner who enables your passions as mine does, and makes your favorite ride look this good.—Rob Siegel
