Early 318i questions.

[cafexs]

I recently picked up a 1985 318i and have to say I'm pretty happy with the car. When I went to look at it, I found out that the car was shipped here from Germany in '94 when the previous owner moved to the states. So it's got the analog clock, euro bumpers, marker lights installed on the body, and all that other stuff - which I thought was kinda neat ^.^ The guy had an e motor dropped into it, which is cool - but this car is going to be a project.

My plan is to pretty much mod / rebuild the suspension of the car (I've read about e36 swaps and the like) I want more stopping power, and a preferably beefier set up to support the eventual LS swap treatment the car will (can) hopefully get. I guess my question is, aside from the motor / manual steering / drum brakes in the early 318's, what else is different? I don't want to read up on a 5 lug conversion or z3 to e30 rear end swap, just to find out that the '85 318's have different mounting brackets or points from all the other e30's out there =/.

It's my understanding that there ARE differences from the pages I've searched and read over the last week, but I can't find anything that definitely states what is, or isn't the same. Did I screw myself by buying the wrong platform for a project like this? :-?

[reelizmpro]

The chassis is the same so subframes and all that can be swapped. These days the difference between the models is virtually irrelevent because the upgraded parts can be sourced cheap and people figured out how to swap everything including engines. Is it the best platform out of the box? No. U will have to swap more things over but at least its the lightest weight.

[jeffnhiscars]

The drum to disc swap requires you change out the trailing arms & ebrake cables.