Cross member bar

[Dan-ny-m398]

This weekend I had my oil pan gasket replaced, and they had to drop the cross member and a whole bunch of stuff to get the oil pan out, anyways when I was driving home I started hearing a noise everytime I hit the brakes, and once I went back to the shop and after much looking around I found out that the crossmember bar moves everytime that the car brakes, we tryed tightening the screws as much as we could but it still moves, can someone tell me if I have to replace the crossmember or if there anything that I can do to stop this noise that's driving me insane. also the front end feels like crap, the suspession it's all over the place.

[Dan-ny-m398]

[winfred]

well to state obvious something is loose, if it was quiet before the work then look at everything that was touched by the mechanic, cause something wasn't put back right

[gale]

I'll bet you dollars to donuts they stripped or broke one of the cross-member bolts. They bolt into an internal threaded sleeve that is welded into the chassis box beam. They are very prone to rust since the sleeve can pool water in them for years. They're the ones with the plastic covers about the size of a quarter, on the tops of the box beams in the engine compartment. Anticipating doing the pan gasket on my e32 some time in the future, I periodically pop the caps off & squirt a few cc's of oil down them so they'll stay free from rust.

I dropped the crossmember on my e28 & broke one bolt taking it apart and another putting it back together again. I think I ended up taking the whole thing apart again to get access to remove the stub end of the broken bolt.

If you know for fact the bolt is loose and cannot resolve it yourself, take it back to the shop & make them do it over.

[winfred]

raise the motor and put 4" wood blocks under the motor mounts, it's not hard and also you don't need to screw with crap like that. loosen the fan shroud, pop off the air boot and jack away

Anticipating doing the pan gasket on my e32 some time in the future,.

[liquidtiger720]

I'll bet you dollars to donuts they stripped or broke one of the cross-member bolts. They bolt into an internal threaded sleeve that is welded into the chassis box beam. They are very prone to rust since the sleeve can pool water in them for years. They're the ones with the plastic covers about the size of a quarter, on the tops of the box beams in the engine compartment. Anticipating doing the pan gasket on my e32 some time in the future, I periodically pop the caps off & squirt a few cc's of oil down them so they'll stay free from rust.

I dropped the crossmember on my e28 & broke one bolt taking it apart and another putting it back together again. I think I ended up taking the whole thing apart again to get access to remove the stub end of the broken bolt.

If you know for fact the bolt is loose and cannot resolve it yourself, take it back to the shop & make them do it over.

Do you have a visual of that bolt? or a p/n so i can find it. Haha. Im not to savvy using the ETK.

[Dan-ny-m398]

I'll bet you dollars to donuts they stripped or broke one of the cross-member bolts. They bolt into an internal threaded sleeve that is welded into the chassis box beam. They are very prone to rust since the sleeve can pool water in them for years. They're the ones with the plastic covers about the size of a quarter, on the tops of the box beams in the engine compartment. Anticipating doing the pan gasket on my e32 some time in the future, I periodically pop the caps off & squirt a few cc's of oil down them so they'll stay free from rust.
.

So what do you think I should do ?? replace the cross member?? and can you point out in the picture what exactly you are talking about? .

[gale]

They'll need to put it up on a lift & inspect the bolts. I doubt the cross-member(s) themselves need replacing but they need to check that the bolts are tight. Also, the forward cross-member has dowel pins that it registers in. I forget if the pins are in the chassis or the cross-member, but either way, they need to check that the pins are engaged in the holes and that the cross-member isn't teetering on the pins (the pins are welded).

Here are a few pic's:

[liquidtiger720]

Wow. Those are great pictures gale. I will check those out on my car. I had the same problem as Dan after I had my transmission rebuilt, but I thought it was my control arms (those need to be replaced anyways)

[Hector]

to replace the oil pan gasket. All he had to do was just drop one end of the crossmember (passenger side) enough to slide the pan out. You do have to loosen the 3 bolts of the bracket housing the sway bar rubber bushing but you don't have to remove them completely. Then you either insert wooden blocks under the mounts as Winfred describes or you can use 2 floor jacks and place one under the AC compressor and the other under the power steering pump up, lift the engine and you're good to go.

Anyway, I think Don is onto something. When I took the 3 xmbr bolts out, water and rust came out as Don said. Couldn't believe it, the bolt threads and the threads in the xmbr were extremely corroded. I cleaned the threads in the xmbr holes out as much as I could then sprayed WD40 in there. Did the same with the bolt threads. I also replaced the plastic caps that go in the subframe beam. I think there are 6 of them. Also, it would be pretty obvious to miss that the dowel pins are not inserted in the subframe upon installation of the xmbr. If that were the case, then the xmbr bolts wouldn't have enough reach to get to the threaded holes.