I mentioned that if they were so sure of this incompatibility, it sure would have been helpful for them to clearly put that information on their pages selling these products so as to avoid problems like this. I called up AKG about the broken bushing and they told me they are incompatible with aluminum subframe bushings and that they would not help cover any cost of replacements.
IIRC my aluminum subframe bushings are from BW. I was pretty confidant that I had done my homework before buying all the parts for my car, and common forum lore had me believe that because the diff is not a stressed member like it is on the E30, and that I could combine different stiffness bushings for the diff and subframe without worrying about problems like this. After an event two months ago I was doing a post-race inspection and noticed that one of my AKG 95A (their softer compound) diff bushings had cracked: Well, I found a new problem to add to the list. It has only made it to 4-5 rally-x events because of all the problems. I put together this car almost two years ago, but due to all sorts of headaches, I've probably only put 3,000 miles on the car. It's now back to running 50/50 BMW coolant, and everything is running smoothly and cool!
I ran some Evaporust cooling system cleaner through the car because the passages looked pretty nasty compared to my old motor, which involved doing two full fills with just water after running the cleaner to really clean everything out, so I certainly got lots of practice burping the system. It seems that wasn't enough to really get the coolant moving around, and after increasing the revving speed and the duration of revving, I have not had any problems burping coolant. Previously, I had only revved it to 2000 rpm for 5-10 seconds a few times. After it was all said and done, the solution for me seemed to be revving the motor to 3000-4000 rpm for 10-20 seconds a few times while up on ramps. The next issue was getting the cooling system to burp correctly. This allowed the pedal to fully depress the switch, and my starting issues haven't come back since! However, even after I got it nice and tight, it still looked like it wasn't fully depressing the switch, so I glued a stack of pennies together, then glued them all to the back of the clutch pedal. My problems were two-fold: the stop had worked its way loose, and had come up too high, which kept the pedal from depressing the clutch switch button. Sure enough, on their site they mention that it can cause starting problems if not adjusted correctly. I first checked the wires going to the starter, but they were all tight, so I eventually remembered that I had installed the BimmerWorld clutch stop. The next problem was the intermittent starting. This also cleared up my rough running issues, where sometimes the car felt like it was bogging and then recovering. Lesson learned, and now my markings on their wires are much more visible. When I swapped them around my idle immediately cleared up and the fuel trim codes never came back. I had marked my primary O2 sensors when I installed them in the manifolds, but I somehow got them mixed up when plugging them into the harness. The first problem I encountered were the four fuel trim codes. Anyways, let's do some updates! I had my share of problems after installing the motor, so I want to detail the resolutions of them before dumping a load of pictures on you. Well everyone, I pretty much let this thread die when I was busy doing the motor swap, and then the Photobucket debacle happened, and it's taken me a while to devise a proper long term solution for hosting my pictures.