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I thought I had posted my impressions after doing the work to every place where I had asked for input. I guess not.
It's winter so: 1/ I have winter tires on (and this is my first winter with these new winter tires so they're not well known to me 2/ every creak and crunch in the interior is magnified in cold weather.
I'm reserving judgement on "all positive" so far. I do NOT feel a return to my E39 and E90 steering - so the Internet has that wrong. It's improved, yes, but I feel more amplification of the hard edges of bridge expansion joints and broken pavement more than I feel the "good news" of real steering. Now, keep in mind I don't have my summer tires on yet. I could get improved feel with that, or even worse bumps and crashing.
Aside from feel, I have noticed much better manners from the car. And I don't mean superior only to immediately before the change while driving with the blown bushings. It tracks through harder turns better, I think when corner speeds got higher even a good condition stock bushing deflects and starts to let the outer wheel toe out, which increases the turn radius, then you need to add more steering input, then it scrubs and toes out more etc...
The first thing I noticed on pretty much my first drive - there's a sweeping left that I've been driving on to a certain area of town for errands for 20 years. When in the left lane there is a manhole cover which the left wheels go through. It's reasonably level with the road surface so it's not a pothole but it unsettles the chassis. I usually need some kind of steering correction, or the car tracks slightly to the outside when going through it, and the steering wheel pulls a little. My observations are top tier summer rubber on my E39, E90 and my F10 for the last 10 years. I was coming home from this errand the day after installing the monoball thrust arms, driving a little sporty (on winter tires) and I just went right through this thing - no step sideways, no steering correction, no movement in the steering wheel, tracked perfectly.
I did not expect this kind of change from thrust arm improvements. The forces don't seem in the right direction, but I noticed immediately. My E39 had poly bushings too, and yet I was accustomed to this bobble in handling.
At any rate - I haven't been tempted to get the monoballs off the car, but in the back of my mind I'm wondering if poly wouldn't be better. I am concerned about replacing something with a lot of give with something that has no give at all. Is my subframe going to get bent if I hit something really large? Poly would at least still have some give in it.
We'll see what the summer brings. My bushings were SHOT and needed replacing immediately so didn't have the luxury of time to think too long about it, nor wait until summer to do the evaluation. I plan to press the original bushings out of the original arms and hag on to them in case I want to switch to poly. The ball joints still seem good on them.
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