Resolved to my satisfaction. Bilstein replaced CO and has agreed to pay for rental car and installation. Root cause was determined to be incorrect droplink installation. See sister thread on turbo board for details
https://www.6speedonline.com/forums/...ics-2-a-7.html

 

Wow, covering your rental car is more then what I would have expected. Nice work! And nice work Bilstein.

 

Glad you got the issue resolved!

I am confused a bit on correct installation as reviewed in the turbo/GT2 forum. Can the droplinks only be installed incorrectly in the wide body application? Because I get popping sounds from the passenger side all the time when exiting my driveway. Should this lead me to believe that my droplink could be installed incorrectly on my narrow body car?

 

droplink installation is the same for WB and NB application which means there are 4 possible ways that it can be installed but only one is correct. I was always told that these strange sounds were normal. I don't believe that to be so. The blue ball should be towards the front and on the outboard side of the sway, if not, then I think that may be the cause of your noisy CO's
if you look at my pics, your car should have the same configuration.
Dave

 

Got it...So the failure you experienced was not necessarily due to the straight vs curved droplink it was more so due to the droplink being installed in an incorrect manner?

I surely will be jacking up my car to check for this since I installed them myself. I am a bit unclear how there would be 4 different ways that the droplink could be installed though. Could you please clarify?

Thanks!

 

The drop links have a top and bottom. On the topside, the blue ball can be forward or rearward. On the bottom side the blue ball can be on the inside the sway or outside the sway. Therefore there are 4 possibilities.
The correct way is
topside blue ball forward
Bottom side blue ball outside of sway.