Project E36 323is: Building the Poor Man's M3, Part 6: Tales of a Guibo: What The Hell is That Vibration?
Not too long after we finished installing our Turner Motorsports Power Package 1 update with aFe intake and Jim Conforti tune, our 323is developed a vibration under acceleration in 2nd gear. The vibration would only occur between 3,000-4,000 RPM, and it was limited to just second gear under heavy acceleration. After a few more days, however, the vibration was noticeable in all gears, and through the entire RPM range. Things were getting serious.
In order to diagnose our problem, we had to first get the car in the air and check the usual suspects: wheel bearings, axles, tires and wheel balance. Everything looked fine upon initial inspection, but after some internet forum research we came across many E36 owners who've had similar problems, and it usually came down to either the Guibo (flex disk) or the center support bearing for the driveshaft.
The Guibo is the black coupler between the output shaft of the transmission and the driveshaft. As you can see there are some noticeable cracks in ours, so it was safe to suspect that this was the culprit behind our vibration issue.
In order to replace it, the first thing we had to do was get the car back in the air and drop the exhaust and heat shielding a bit between the driveshaft and the floor of the vehicle. Here you can see Howard from TechnoSquare unbolting the rear muffler section of our Corsa exhaust.
Once the rear section was unbolted, we moved onto the middle section and the heat shield in order to gain the most access without fully removing them.
Next up we needed to remove the driveshaft, so we made sure to mark its position in relation to the mounting point on the differential. We repeated the same procedure up front where the driveshaft mated to the transmission.
