BMR Lowering Springs; Drag Version; Red (15-23 Mustang w/o MagneRide)

Video Review & Installation

Justin: If you're serious about straight line performance with your 2015 and newer non-MagneRide GT then you might want to consider a set of the BMR Drag Springs that we're talking about here today. Now the BMR options will offer a unique drop of 1.2 inches up front along with a 1/2 an inch drop for the rear, making for that classic muscle car stance, while the linear spring rates will be spec'd in a way to get your car to squat and leave much better, equating to better launches and 60-foot times overall. Now your price point for the popular kit here in all four springs, gonna be right around 200 bucks and the install according to the site will get a soft three outta three wrenches on the difficulty meter and take you a few hours to complete from start to finish. But if you hang with me for a little bit, we'll show you how it's done later in the video.BMR is without a doubt, one of the premier aftermarket suspension companies for the late model Mustang in particular and exist to make your Mustang either handle or launch much better than before. And the latter is certainly gonna be true in regards to what these springs are all about. Again, getting your S550 GT out of the hole quicker, off the line better, and just 60-foot like it never has before.Now BMR attacks this from two separate fronts. First and foremost, they use what is called a linear spring rate which is gonna remain consistent and constant through the entire compression cycle unlike that of the other popular spring in the category, a progressive spring which as the name suggests, progressively firms up through compression and that varying rate can make consistency a little bit more challenging. Now knowing this, BMR and other companies typically go with a linear rate like this for consistency in racing or performance applications, and that's what they've done here again with their drag application. Now speaking of that, specific spring rates here are gonna be 150 pounds for the front, 800 pounds for the rear spring which is a dead giveaway that these springs are designed for drag use in mind.Now you like to see a very light front spring like the BMR option here to help promote that weight transfer to the rear, especially on this IRS-equipped S550s where squat is gonna be a good thing. Secondly, the unique drop of the BMR drag springs will help promote that 60-foot performance thanks to the bigger drop up front, again just over an inch compared to a 1/2-inch drop in the rear which is that total nose down dragster look but one that obviously serves a purpose to help you transfer that weight to the rear like we keep talking about. Now on top of that, it just makes for a very tough look, we call that the rake in the industry or in the aftermarket, again, nose down, kind of old school muscle car and, in my opinion, it's also a look that will allow for plenty of tire in the back if you happen to be running a big 28-inch tall radial or slick.But aside from performance and intended use of the BMR drag springs, every spring BMR produces down in Florida meets the same testing and manufacturing process. Now this basically includes the cold wound, CNC winding process, high-temperature stress relieving, and shot peening which does, by the way, allow the company to back every single set of springs they sell with their lifetime warranty against any spring sag. So just worth pointing out guys that, you know, sometimes with aftermarket springs, after a couple years, they get a little worn out for lack of a better word, you start seeing some sag, not a concern here with the BMR options.Also worth mentioning, and this is pretty important and that is the fact that BMR does offer these springs for just the fronts or just the rears or all four like you're looking at here. So if you happen to be running a, maybe a coilover up front from Viking or QA1 and you just want to grab the rear springs, that is a possibility and vice versa. However, with that said, just make sure you select the right option from the product page here at AM before ordering your springs.But now we want to show you just what it takes to get the BMR springs installed. So to do so, my buddy Andrew is gonna walk you through the process using my 2019 GT by the way and we'll walk you through some of the tools needed for the job as well.Andrew: Tools required for this install are going to be a pry bar, a dead blow, a ball peen hammer, various extensions here, 1/2-inch drive, a 3/8 drive, universal swivel, that's a 6-millimeter Allen key on a 3/8 drive. You're gonna need sockets ranging from 10 all the way up to 24, push pin removal tool, a 10-millimeter wrench, 17 and 21, a 1/2-inch torque wrench, 3/8 torque wrench. Optional over here is going to be our 3/8 impact and 1/2-inch air gun.So the first step to installing your front springs is to get your vehicle up in the air. If you don't have a lift like I do, you can use a nice set of jack stands and a good jack. We're gonna get our wheel and tire off first. So now we're looking behind our caliper. There's two bolts holding on his caliper to our knuckle. They are 15-millimeter. So let's go ahead and get our socket on there. So I'm just gonna leave a couple threads on that so I can tackle the top one and this doesn't start falling off the brake rotor. Now if your calipers haven't been off yet, may be a little tough to get these out, but use a little American muscle and you'll get them out. All right, let me grab my caliper hanger, you can use a bungee cord. We're gonna put our caliper hanger right over here on our brake line support, that's nice and solid, then we're gonna go ahead and back the rest of these bolts out by hand. There's one, and then there's the bottom. Slide it off our rotor. And then we're gonna use our bolt hole here, put it through our caliper and hang it just like that. That way there's no stress on that brake line and we can pull our rotor off.So I have my rubber mallet right here and the rotor is kind of rust welded on there. I'm just gonna hit the face on about four sides just to free it up, and there it goes. So you don't have to take your dust shield off but I'm going to because behind there is our ABS speed sensor. And we're gonna have to pull this wire off of our strut assembly. So let's go ahead and take these three 10 millimeters holding your dust shield on. These out of here. And this is our sensor right here. All right, so I have a 10-millimeter ratcheting wrench, I just love these things. What we're gonna do is take this wheel speed sensor outta here, just crack it free and you can take it out by hand, just wiggle it out. Then we'll take a trim panel removal tool or a push pin removal tool and pry off the sensor line that is attached to our strut assembly itself. And there's one up here on the other side where your sway bar is. And get that out of there. Then we'll just tuck this out of the way.So what we're gonna do now is remove our sway bar end link on the strut assembly itself. So I have a 17-millimeter wrench that we're actually gonna stick behind it. And you could use a 10-millimeter on the front side of it but I like to use the back. Then I have an 18-millimeter deep socket. We're just gonna spin this free, get my harder mallet.Now with your brakes, your sway bar and your ABS line out of the way, we can tackle the two bolts holding the strut to the knuckle. Now the nut on the backside is a 24-millimeter. So I have a 24-millimeter deep socket on my impact gun here, then I have a 21-millimeter wrench for this bolt head. Let's go ahead and get these loosened up. So we're actually going to thread the nut back on just a little bit until it's flush with that. And I'll show you why in a minute. Now the head of this bolt is actually splined into the knuckle. So grab yourself a ball peen hammer and again you want to make sure that's flush so you're not messing up any threads. And just give it a couple tap. All right, there we go. Now you can take your nuts off. All right, so now that we tapped our bolts free, we're going to pull them out. And there we go. Now we can get the top nuts off and get our strut assembly out of the way.Now we're ready to remove our strut. You have three 15-millimeter nuts on the top of your strut and strut tower, so we're gonna remove two right now. We're gonna do the ones furthest away from us. And now I have my socket on there, I'm gonna firmly grab the strut below so it does not fall. Then we're gonna remove the strut as one.All right, so we have our strut assembly in our wall mounted spring compressor, I doubt you're gonna have one of these at your house but you can go down to your local auto parts store and rent one. You just have to put a deposit down and return it and you'll get that back. So I have it as even as I can and as level to the ground as I can. We're gonna lower this down, start compressing our spring off of our strut. We're just gonna go enough so that there's not gonna be too much tension on that top nut. So I'm gonna compress this down just a little bit more. That should be good there. I'm gonna get my air line connected to my 1/2-inch impact. On my impact I got an extension, a universal swivel, and my deep 21. Just go over the top and take this nut off. Let see if it's spinning, it is spinning. So I'm gonna grab onto the strut below. With the nuts off I'm just gonna slide my strut out of the way. I'm gonna take the nut off the top hat there. I'm gonna start releasing tension off of that stock spring. So I have my top hat and my rubber isolator, we are gonna use that for our new spring.All right, now we're gonna put our new BMR spring into our compressor. You don't want to go too far down to the bottom because that does have to sit on our strut. Let's set that there. Then I'm gonna take my top hat and you'll see where the old spring used to sit, I'm gonna put that exactly where our new spring ends. Just like that. Now I want to make this as level as possible. So I'm gonna jack it up on the corners here, that should do it. Let's lower this back into place. All right. Compress this down a little bit until we have enough threads showing on our strut. Then we can start that nut.So let's bring our strut back in. So this has an isolator on the bottom as well that we have to line up with the bottom of our new spring. Let's get our boot through. Make sure our spring is sitting on that isolator correctly. And I have to compress this a little bit more. So let me take this back out. I'll leave the boot and the bump stop in there. Go through that bump stop, grab that dust boot. Feel for a couple threads there, then we compress it just one more turn. All right, so now that we have that 21-millimeter started, let's tighten it down, holding onto the bottom of the strut. And there's our new assembly.Now that we have our strut assembly assembled with our new BMR spring, we can bring it into place here and I'm gonna pop the top up here. Here we go. I can start a couple of nuts up here and tighten these down.So with our strut in place, now we can reinstall our 21-millimeter bolts. You are gonna have to put a little muscle on this knuckle to bring it into place here. I'm just gonna push down and get my top one started, just like that. And then you can actually push on the strut to get that bottom bolt in. Now you can tap the head of this bolt to get those splines to line back up or you can put your nut back on, have your wrench and just draw it back in. It's up to you how you want to do that. Let's get our nuts back on.So now that we have our strut in place, we can start connecting our sway bar end link, put our ABS line back on, that dust shield, rotor, and caliper. Let's go ahead and start with our sway bar end link. Got that 17-millimeter wrench in my hand, that's just to hold the stud here from spinning. Find the slot here and then my 18-millimeter nut. Tighten this down. So let's go ahead and reattach our speed sensor here, that was that short 10-millimeter bolt. Then we can get our wire back into the clips here. So now we're gonna put our dust shield back into place. Those are the three 10 millimeters. Gonna start them by hand here and finish them off with my impact. All right, so let's go ahead and put our rotor back into place here.All right, what we're gonna do now is take our caliper, get it off our hanger here, free that up, and we're gonna slide it over our rotor. I like to take a look at my pads while I'm in here, making sure that they're going on nice and even. So that's slid into place. And the support of my knee here, start my top bolt in the back. That way I know it's not gonna fall. Now I'm gonna attach the bottom bolt. That's gonna wrap up the driver side. We're gonna repeat all those steps on the passenger side then head to the rear.Now moving onto the rear, you can see we already have our wheels and tires off, so there are two different ways you can do this. We're gonna do it the easiest way because we have that four post lift. What we're gonna do is remove the two bolts securing the bottom of our shock. And then we actually have four bolts holding our IRS cradle in there. So we're gonna put pole jacks underneath and then we're going to evenly jack it down and that way we can get that spring out. The other way is removing those two bolts for the lower shock then after that we have to remove the lower bolt for this vertical link, the lower bolt for our sway bar end link, the outer bolt for our lower control arm, and then the two inner. That's a lot of work. So let me show you how to do it the easiest way.All right, so here are our two 15-millimeter bolts, I've got a deep socket here, we're just gonna remove these. You can see it drop down just a little bit. All right, so we are just forward of our rear cradle and there are two 13-millimeter bolts that we have to remove first before we tackle our rear cradle bolts themself. So these are just support brackets. I'm gonna remove these. Do that on both sides.All right, so before we remove our stock spring, I'm anticipating a little clearance issues, so what I'm gonna do is remove the bottom sway bar end link, it's an 18-millimeter nut, and there's a 5-millimeter Allen key head on that. So just take that off now. So now we're gonna take a 21-millimeter socket to our cradle bolts. And we are gonna remove these completely and it's important to note I do have two pole jacks underneath that rear subframe and now I'm gonna switch up my tooling to a long extension and a universal swivel and get around this exhaust. And if that exhaust becomes an issue, it's only six bolts to remove it.So with the four cradle bolts out of the way, I've got Justin over here on the other pole jack, we're going to lower the whole IRS subframe down evenly. I'm gonna do a little bit more on my side just to get a little more clearance for that spring. All right. So I do have a pry bar in the lower control arm and Justin's over there holding on to the spring. I'm gonna put a little tension on this lower control arm. Gonna yank the spring out.Now we're gonna install our rear springs. I have Justin over here and my big pry bar, I'm going to stick it in my lower control arm here just to gain a little extra clearance so we can get this spring in. And it's important to note we are reusing those stock isolators, top and bottom. Now we're just reconnecting our sway bar end link here. We had to remove it, just to gain a little extra clearance to get that spring in, an 18-millimeter nut and a 5-millimeter Allen key.So with our springs installed, we're gonna be raising the subframe back into place. Justin is on the passenger side over there. We're just gonna try to get this thing lined back up. Then we're gonna start our rear bolts first. We're gonna tighten these up by hand first and then get our two forward bolts in. So with our rear bolts in, let's put the bracket on the front first and then again start those cradle bolts and thread them as much as you can.Now let's go ahead and get our shock mounted back up. We are using the factory shocks for now. I know Justin is gonna be upgrading in a little while though. Now we're gonna go ahead and torque up a couple of things. The two 15-millimeter bolts, they get 41-foot pounds, so let's do that now. Do that on both sides and then we can get the body bolts. And your body bolt will get 129-foot pounds. Do that for all four of them.That's gonna wrap up my install of the BMR Drag Shocks for your Mustang S550. And for all things Mustang, keep it here at americanmuscle.com.