Symptoms of bad sway bar links

[mbogosia]

My wifes sway bar links on her 92 e36 are bad. They are torn and have not been replaced ever. What do the links effect and how does they change the feeling of the car? What changes in the feeling when they go bad? We have a slight clank going over sharper bumps. Could this be b/c of the bad links?

[BigKriss]

yep, bad swaybar links go clank, clank, clank!

[Bill R.]

noisy little bastards if you drive over washboard like roads often...The clank you're hearing is highly likely to be the links.

My wifes sway bar links on her 92 e36 are bad. They are torn and have not been replaced ever. What do the links effect and how does they change the feeling of the car? What changes in the feeling when they go bad? We have a slight clank going over sharper bumps. Could this be b/c of the bad links?

[mbogosia]

Okay well I am going to start there. Several people have said it could be a bad strut mount, but my links are bad and easier to replace.

[SRR2]

Those things are evil. They ought to be considered scheduled maintenance just like an oil change because they fail so often. Not only are they noisy, if they're loose enough the handling will feel very sloppy. Over my 20 years of owning BMWs, I've probably changed a dozen sets of these, some of which were so miserable they failed under original vehicle warranty.

I've seen multiple manufacturers of them. The best of the bad lot is Lemfoerder (sp?) but you may see some from TRW IIRC which I'd avoid if possible. Be careful when you install them not to twist or tear the rubber boots over the link's ball joints. They fail almost immediately after water gets in there and rusts the ball and socket.

Also, they're hard to find. The usual parts places like AutohausAZ and BMA don't carry them as far as I've seen. I've found the best prices and availability are at eap4parts.com, however I just tried to reach their web site and got 'page not found' so I can't say what's going on there. Could be a temporary glitch, or they could be out of business.

[BigKriss]

BMA sell almost every BMW part around. Give them the part number and they give you a price.We also talked about adjustable heavy duty swaybar links. They are cheap.

http://www.bimmer.info/forum/showthread.php?t=16812

[bimmer guy]

noisy little bastards if you drive over washboard like roads often...The clank you're hearing is highly likely to be the links.

exactly