318i Engine Swap

[AbxBink1@xxxxxxx]

Hi Everyone,

About a 2 years ago I bought a 1986 318i from this guy down in Virginia.  It
needed some, OK I'm not going to kid you It needed a lot of work.  Apparently
this car was bought in Germany by some African foreign exchange student, and
instead of putting antifreeze in his car he thought water will do.  Well, on
some cold winter day he finds his block is cracked and leaking water so he
trades it to a dealer and then I buy it.  I knew what was wrong before I
bought the car but I said to myself, its a 318 the engine cant be that hard to
change.  The car only had a little over 30,000 miles on it.

After thinking about the engine for a while I decided to pick up a low mileage
block from this guy and just swap the head.  Everything went well.  I took out
the engine, swapped the head and replaced the engine.

On inspection of the old European block I found noticed that the pistons of
the European block were higher compression (they had a small area that was
higher on them) So I got to thinking it would be cool to have a higher
compression engine.  But what I wanted to know is, Would these pistons improve
my performance so much that it would be worth pulling the engine again? If so
how much more would the compression be?

I've also talked to a guy that said he knew someone who took a 2002 2.0 engine
block and put the 318i head on.  In theory it would let you use fuel injection
with a 2.0 instead of a 1.8.  I was wondering if anyone else has herd of this,
or even if anyone has tried it for themselves.

If you have any advice for me please contact me.

Dan Crytzer
(AbxBink1@domain.elided)

86' 318i (euro)
87' 325e
84' 733i

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