Update:
It has been a while!! Time to dig in again.
DUMB BELTS!
Basically after the accessory belts snapped on me THREE TIMES and the crank pulley had a bit of damage the car was deemed not daily drive-able.
Destroyed Belts:
Pully:
Bye Bye! (For now)
What I found out later was that there is supposed to be bracket holding the power steering pulley in the correct position but for some reason it wasn't there and a metal spacer was used instead. This resulted in the pulleys not being exactly lined up, there was also some movement so eventually the belt would slip off and shred.
It result was that the 318ti sat for basically a year and half. By this time I had already put 10k on the m52 swap, so it did do some good work.
Suspension: Since this all happened more than a year ago, I am not sure when I worked some more on the suspension, but I think it was right before the belts got torn up for the third time.
I picked up some TC Kline springs, z3 rear 350lbs springs and front 450 springs. I wanted to see how it would run with a bit softer rear compared to the front.
The front springs were a bit old and rusted so I cleaned them up and repainted them:
Regular Tein spring vs shorter TC Kline spring, cleaned up and painted:
Assembled:
Mounted and ready to go:
Rear:
Comparison, left to right: OEM Z3M / Z3M H&R Sport / Tein e36 m3 / TC Kline spring #1 (type?) / TC Kline #2 (type?)
Installed:
It is interesting to note that despite the TC Kline springs are shorter than the H&R springs they are coiled tighter and the coils won't sit on itself like the H&R springs will.