M3 front end chassis straightening

[abrokenframe]

Hello,

I recently picked up an M3 that has spent most of the last 20 years as a track car. The car itself is actually pretty nice with a full interior and not completely raced out. However, it has been on its side once, which required a replacement driver door and front fender. This incident or something similar has caused the front section of the car to be twisted just a bit. The passenger's side appears to be about 1" higher than the driver's side from the shock towers forward. It's pretty easy to see.

The car is completely drivable and has been tracked like this for a long time... the thing is my plan is to get this back to a nice street driver but the messed up dimensions are driving me nuts.

Most of my experience is in restoring the mechanical side of things, so have never dealt with an issue like this. The motor is out for a rebuild so now might be a good time to see if there's anything I can do about this.

Has anyone had experience with this type of repair? Just trying to gauge how difficult and costly something like this would be to fix, or if it's even possible.

[Northern]

There are pictures of frame dimensions out there from various sources, Should be able to find a body shop with a frame machine for good results, otherwise you're going to need to build something to sit the car level and pull sections back into place.

For a shitbox, I'm sure there are cheaper ways, but an M3 is probably worth having it done by a half decent shop that does this sort of thing all day.

[packratbimmer]

I would start out with a thorough alignment to see where the car sits, as a baseline. If it is straight in terms of alignment, it might make sense to weld in straight "cosmetic" parts in front of the structural areas.

[abrokenframe]

I'm pretty positive the car's alignment is fine since its been raced like this for many years. You can tell the chassis is off because the front strut brace can be difficult to line up, but between the GC suspension and adjustable camber plates, the car tracks well.

Considering it's actually a pretty nice car, I'd really prefer to the rails correct... only issue I'm having is it's kind of difficult to find a shop that wants to quote the job! They all say the car's too old for their equipment for one reason or another.

If anyone knows of a shop in SoCal I'm all ears.

[TobyB]

twisted just a bit. The passenger's side appears to be about 1" higher

even for a full- out race car, an inch is a lot more than 'just a bit!'

The frame rack will tell all. And yes, you need one to fix this. Preferably either a good one
that has lots of old data, or at least
an old one, that runs on XP, that still has E30 shell dimensions in it.

I've done this- both bend the car and pull it back down. Putting the nose into the wall folds the
front inner fenders in, by design, so what you end up doing to reverse it is put a forward, downward
(to some degree) pull on the shell, and see if you can get all of the distortion out.
Which you never can, but sometimes you can get close with some pretty brutal hammer and dolly work.

The corollary is that you're pretty likely to pop some spot welds out right before you realize that you've
hit the limit of what the frame machine can do for you. Then you have to decide-
pull a bit more, get all the undercoating off the seams, and seam weld the fucker,
or back off and live with a somewhat- weaker and somewhat- less- precise 'stock' flexibility.
Given that the Pro3 cars tend to fail at the front inner fender spot welds, me, I'd pull it right back,
clean it all up, and seam- weld that M3 so it stays nice and straight.

t