A few days after scoring a nice set of Style 82 wheels with fresh rubber on them and having my son Ethan mount them, I was driving the E39 over a patch of uneven road surface, and heard a metallic “thunk” from the left front corner. As I’d just written a piece three weeks ago about how important it is to check your ball joints, I wanted to lay hands and eyeballs on the car’s front end as soon as possible. On the rest of the slow and careful drive home, the problem was very consistent—nothing felt amiss with the steering, but any pothole or substantial pavement irregularity elicited the noise.
Normally, to inspect the front end, I’d jack the nose of the car up and set it on stands, or put the car up on the mid-rise lift, but both of these activities aren’t back-friendly, so instead I broke out the plastic ramps. Even before I began hobbling about like an old man, I found that the ramps have their role to play for inspections or quick repairs where I don’t need to pull the wheels off or to get the car very high. So I plunked the ramps down in front of the house, drove the E39 onto them, shut it off, put it in gear, set the handbrake, grabbed a flashlight, and very carefully crawled under it—my first such excursion in two months.
As soon as I was on my back and skooching under, I thought “This is dumb. To check ball joints, you need the big pair of slip-joint pliers. Plus, you probably should’ve jacked it up first so you could grab the wheels at 3 and 9 o’clock and check for play.” But what the hey, I was already in position, so let’s have a look.
As it turned out, that was all I needed to do, because I was immediately face to face with this.
What the…?
It took me a few moments to understand what I was even looking at. The long thin piece running at a diagonal is the sway bar link. The broken piece of metal at the top is what RealOEM calls the “Left Swing Support Bracket” (part number 31351091987). It’s supposed to be attached with two bolts to the collar that pinches around the strut and provides the mounting for the hub and caliper. Here is the corresponding intact piece on the right side.
The right-side sway bar link and its attachment bracket and bolts.
In contrast, on the left side, I could see where the remaining section of the bracket was still attached. The fact that the upper bolt is missing may mean that the bolt was loose and vibrated out, and with insufficient support, the bracket snapped from the force on it from the sway bar link. I rememebered that I did replace the left side wheel bearing last summer, and I suppose it’s possible that, as part of that repair, I disconnected this bracket and had forgotten to tighten the bolt. Oh well.
Lower arrow points to remaining piece of bracket, upper arrow to hole from missing bolt.
My son Ethan and I both use this car frequently, so my immediate task was to pull out the sway bar link simply to make it stop banging around. I really didn’t want to risk things with my back by trying to crack nuts that were obviously rusty—that will have to wait for me to put the car in the garage so I can use the air tools.
Yeah, that’s not coming off easily.
But then I had an idea. In late winter I’d bought a 1500-watt induction heater when I saw that Temu had one for $154 that Amazon was selling for $230 and was well-reviewed, and I’d never had the chance to use it. So I broke it out, inserted the circular heating element closest in size to the nut, ran an extension cord from my front porch, and fired it up.
My induction heater virginity ends.
The area I was heating began smoking. A lot.
You probably see what’s going on. At the time, I did not.
When the heater stopped for its self-imposed cool-down period, the nut (and especially the end of the threaded stud) were glowing cherry-red.
That’s what you want to see.
Unfortunately, when I put my ratchet and socket on the nut, it did not freely spin off like you see in the induction heater ads. To get it off, I was going to have to fight it, and I wasn’t prepared to do that. So instead, I tried to swing the sway bar link out of the way, and when I did, it came off in my hand. I looked up at the still-smoking section, and realized what had happened: The heat from the induction heater had traveled through the metal into the ball-in-socket section of the sway bar link. The ball was metal, but the cup it was in was plastic, and it melted it and the rubber boot.
Didn’t see that one coming.
Great. So now I needed not just the bracket but a sway bar link as well. Sigh. Might as well settle down at the laptop and get ’em ordered. I searched my usual parts vendors (FCP Euro, GetBMWParts, etc), and found that the bracket is unique to the E39 and is listed as no longer available or on backorder. The only ones I could find on eBay were from used parts from a vendor in Latvia. Now, I’m certain that there are many of these brackets in junkyards all over the country, and I could probably ask Al Taylor to pull one off for me, but it’s a small part to ask someone to go to a fair amount of work for, and the one in Latvia was only about $35 shipped, so I was perfectly happy to click-buy-and-pay and know that the part was “in process.”
Of course I also needed a sway bar link to replace the one I’d destroyed with the induction heater. Unlike the bracket, the link is a normal-wear-and-tear part, and it’s made by dozens of vendors. In fact, replacing the links rang a bell because I had replaced both of them last July. The article was kind enough to refresh my memory that I’d bought two Delphi links from RockAuto, so for $20 shipped, I grabbed the left link.
Until the parts get here, I’ll use the E39 sparingly and only around town. I don’t advise that anyone drive a car at speed with only one end of the sway bar connected.
And I’ll remember to steer clear of using the induction heater on things that are attached to plastic or rubber.
—Rob Siegel
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Rob’s newly-expanded book The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 40 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies (including the new Best Of) from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com/books.
