Ben99Felicia

Car season is here again yay Got some bilstein b6 shocks fitted today The old shocks don't feel like they were doing much, I've not quite finished fitting the new ones yet so I have test driven it but I bet it's a big difference

Cheers mate, I'm glad it might be some use to you. There's always something to fix on these so you'll be practicing those skills before long. I need to sort a few new and reoccurring problems now but it's finding the time

I had to trim the new turbo outlet pipe by 40mm each end, duct tape happens to be the correct width I cut down the original dump valve hose and managed to get it back on the dump valve and new intercooler pipe by swearing at it and using boiling water to heat it up On the hot side I had to flip both of the horns by taking them off their brackets and remounting them upside down Finally I had it all put together, this section took the longest to work out, its very tight in there now and I'll reroot some of it at a later date to make it easier to work on Pretty sucessfull weekend, of course of knocked all of my knuckles off but thats a small price to pay

Airtec intercooler install The intercooler is installed and the results are really good. I'll start by showing the before and after data logs because aside from the kit looking smart it really is all about the performance after all. This is the air intake temperature with the original side mount intercooler. Starting at 18°C it steadily rises to 49°C by the end of the pull, an increase of 31°C. This is the log from today with the new front mount. I'm suprised that the intake temp actual went down from 17.2°C by 1.5°C to15.8°C from the start of the pull and didn't show any rise until after 5000rpm where it reach a maximum of 18.8°C a total rise of only 1.6°C The result in these lower temperatures are also evident in the timing logs. This graph shows the timing pull on each cylinder during the high intake temperatures, the ECU is pulling 3° from the base timing because it is detecting knock, this is reducing the power that the engine makes. With the new intercooler the ECU isn't detecting any knock 🙂 Here are some pictures I took during fitting the kit. I had to trim the crash bar for the intercooler brackets and the plastic cowling at the bottom The pipe work on the cold side was very easy to fit I has to trim the corner of the air vent on each side of the bumper to clear the intercooler bracket I shaved part of the turbo intake pipe to clear the new turbo outlet pipe

I can find the koni str.t for about £500 and the KW v1 seem to be about £1000. In between there's the koni sport for about £800 and bilstein b8 for about £900. I guess if I buy spring and damper kits I would need too mount bushes and bearings for about £100, I think the KW come complete but not sure. I don't know what to do, I'm not sure how to decide

That sounds ideal, which bilsteins are they and what make of spring? The bilsteins are looking expensive but I guess you get what you pay for. Koni look a bit cheaper but I want to be happy with what I buy and I'm not sure if the koni str.t kit will be any good as it's quite cheap compared to bilstein kit I'd be happy with something sporty but not hard or crashy, I've got a mini cooper s r56 with the factory option sports suspension and it's ok but I'd prefer a bit more give. It came with runs flats and was terrible over any sort of damaged tarmac but I can go over stuff without cringing to much now I've got rid of the run flats.

That's good to know because I've ordered one already. The other one I was tempted by is similar to the forge dual pass from Gravity performance, it looks good for the money at £250. The airtec is probably overkill for stage 1 but it shouldn't ever need upgrading. The way it fits so neatly had me sold more than anything. I'm looking at suspension upgrades now if anyone has any recommendations. I've been looking at koni and bilstein, I don't think I want coilovers but might be persuaded.

I bought the APS 265lph from jjc race and rally on ebay. I paid £63.14 at the time which is a bargain, the price has gone up to £88.15 now. Demon Tweeks sell it for £84.50, for some reason the website say its not compactible with my car though, there are 2 versions one for 2wd and 4wd cars. My car is standard apart from a cat back exhaust so it was only ever going to make around 210bhp, he told me a front mount intercooler, sports cat and some bigger injectors (injector duty cycle was getting pretty high) should get me to around 240bhp. I've been looking at the airtec front mount designed to fit the mk4 golf, I wonder if anyone has one fitted to an octavia https://www.airtecmotorsport.com/product/airtec-front-mount-intercooler-for-vw-golf-1-8t/

It has been a while hasn't it...hello again. Where I left off with an o2 sensor fault, I bought a new Bosch sensor and that was sorted. I've done a few bits and pieces over the last few months New rocker cover gasket with cam chain tensioner gasket Bit of a pain to change the tensioner gasket to be honest New knock sensors because I thought the knock I saw from my logs was just bad sensors, it wasn't bad sensors. new uprated fuel pump, didn't really need it but it's done now so... Today I went to badger5 and the got got a stage 1 remap I had been doing some mapping on it myself but other than successfully deleting the sai myself I wasn't happy with the amount of knock and overboost I was getting even on the standard map. I chose badger5 because I'd heard good things and they didn't disappoint, Bill remapped the car and it runs spot on now making a healthy 211bhp and 259ftlb. He advised me to upgrade the intercooler next as it will help with the air intake temps. I'll be looking at intercoolers, suspension and brakes next. I'll also try harder to keep this blog up to date 😂

It has been a while since my last update, I've done a few jobs since. The front anti roll bar bushes had gone bad again so I've changed them for powerflex ones I did a pretty big job a couple of weeks ago, I noticed one of the injector seal or its cup was leaking and also found a split in one of the breather hoses so Ive replaced them all with new gaskets for the inlet manifold and throttle body. I've simplified the hoses a bit and got rid of the sai because it stopped working a while back. I also replaced the fuel hoses as they had some cracks all over them. I've left the n249 valve on for now. I didn't take many photos whilst doing it mainly because I forgot and got carried away with working it all out. The best thing I've had done is new tyres and wheel refurb. Like an idiot I forgot the before photos and the new centre caps haven't arrived yet but you get the idea. I went for 225/45/17 Goodyear eagle f1 asymmetric 6, got them from Halfords as they where the cheapest at £72 each. I had the wheels power coated the standard colour. I'll get some better pictures for the next time to, they aren't even clean in this picture but never mind they still look a lot better than when they had curb rash on every wheel. I'm still chasing a problem which I'm hoping a new front lambda sensor will sort out because I've had this fault code a couple of times recently, with the car hesitating and bucking at low speed.

Hi, I know it has been a long time since you posted this but did you work out what the problem is? I have an identical problem. Thanks Ben

What's going on with the obd port? If you can't read codes you're going to struggle to diagnose anything. It probably isn't the map but you can change it if you have a working obd port

Is the engine warning light on mate?

Well I paid £50 for the engine mount, £62 for the gearbox mount, £105 for all the poly bushes including the one I changed last time on the dog bone and £52 for all the bolts so £269 all together. Expense when you add it all up but cheaper than buying the aftermarket mounts like the 034 from awesome which works out to about £450. It took me slightly longer than it should because I forgot to mention I stripped the thread on the engine mount bracket and had to go get another from the breakers It took forever to get this part out and the replacement back in, anyone that has done a cambelt will know what I'm talking about. I've learnt a lesson about taking more care with bolts lining up properly. It's easily 3 hours work if nothing goes wrong. I need to take a look at the other bushes and the drop links now because there's a clonk when I go from left to right to left like going around an island for example, I did already change the antiroll bar bushes for rubber ones but I'll probably change them again for powerflex. Oh and I fitted a new fuel filter too

So I've been quiet for a while but I have been doing some work on the car so here's a catch up. After changing the one bush on the dog bone the engine didn't move as much but I still wasn't happy with it. I've now changed all the mounts and used all the powerflex bushes and it's much better than it was. I bought a genuine engine mount, a febi gearbox mount and all the new bolts The hardest part is getting the purple bush in and out of the dog bone. I used an old gen 2 mini wheel hub as an anvil to knock out the old one and some threaded bar with big washers to push the new one in. I did all of that a couple of weekends ago. This weekend I've been busy with the old laptop, I had an engine warning light come on last week I don't have vcds yet but this ancient code reader pointed me in the right direction. It hadn't occurred to me that it was quieter than normal on a cold start but the pump had stopped working. So I put my big boy pants on and flashed the ECU for the first time with a map that I'd deleted the sai from. All seems to be well so far... Something else I discovered which is obvious but I wasn't sure about until now is that my car came with some kind of stage 1 map on it. Up until now I'd done a few data logs, I just presumed I'd got something wrong as the boost was showing more than standard and the afr didn't seem right, it turns out I was logging it correctly though. I confirmed it looking at a standard map I downloaded to the one on the car and you can see the difference in load request and lambda request. As this post has reach the 50mb of pictures I'll make a new post showing what I've learnt about mapping later but as it stands Ive put my car onto a standard map with sai delete, I want to learn how to remap it myself and the best place to start is with a stock map. I've also got a blanking plate to remove the sai hardware but I haven't touched that yet