What's up ya'll. Basically, I'm dropped on Teins, and I got less than a finger gap on all sides. I'm not having any problems with my bumper scraping the ground.

I live in l.a and there's a lot of weird dips from time to time, (including one on the 405N when you're almost @ UCLA).

In any case, when I hit these dips, I've always thought that I was scraping my front bumper cause I would hear this crazy ass thudding sound from the inside of my car.

I was driving w/ the windows down today on a slower service road, and had the crazy bump sound happen again. @ first I thought I just hit my bumper again. After thinking about it for a second though, I didn't hear any bumper on road contact, just a thud from inside the car.

Question: Is it possible that my wheel is hitting the inside fender rather than the bumper hitting? I have stock wheels, and I'm pretty sure that besides this I do'nt rub @ all...

Should I be worried? For the Los Angeles Westwood area, my drop is pretty annoying. Granted I'm no lower than many of the stock M3's I see around here, but I'm still kinda freaking out.

 

No takers?

Otherwise I'll probably just have to raise my left side alil'. I'll assume the car just settles real low when I'm sitting in the driver's seat.

 

Nobody has any suggestions @ all? It happened a couple of times again today... ... it's a thump that comes from the driver's side.

Hopefully it's just the wheel hitting the wheel well like I said before, and it can be fixed by adjusting my height just a smidge on that side...

I just had another thought... if that shock in my driver's passenger side is bad, how would I be able to know?

 

well if the wheel is touching the fender, you can always raise the car back up

 

My main concern is whether this thump is extremely bad for the car... I mean it doesn't consistently rub, it just hits it from time to time on really sharp dips.

Has anyone with less than a one finger wheel well space gap encountered this problem too?

 

i too have the thump sound when going over big holes. I guess this is normal, since other ppl with teins are having the same issue

 

Can anyone verify what bobby just said? Do people get a thump from time to time w/ the Teins on really sharp bumps? I know socal has a ridiculous amount of these stupid dips and such.

And what exactly does bottoming out mean?

 

I don't think your hitting the fender since you have stock rims. I'd say it's the wheel well. you may be just too low on some roads. I'd just raise it a tad on all sides & see if it goes away.

 

Your springs may be unable to isolate the sound when they compress and decompress. Usually this is caused as the wheel travels upwards and then quickly downwards in a similar motion to compress the bottom coils at a high rate of speed. The thump can be a the bottom coils hitting each other... You can solve this by adding spring isolators to the bottom coils. You should also check that your sway bar end-links are tightened and the bolts that hold the pillowmount are also tightened..

 

could also be the wheel hitting the plastic fender well.

 

If you tires were hitting the fender well, you would hear a more a squek and you would see you tire chewed up as well. I've had that issue, but thats easily corrected with a mallet and a razor blade. Its sound like what NiteQwill was saying about the springs compressing.

 

I'll check out the end links and pillowmount bolts to ensure they're tightened...

and where do I get spring isolators?