best mod for £100?

[dieselnewbie]

Hi all, want a few ideas please on the best way of modding my Gal. What would you spend the first Ã,£100 on? Love the subtle things that only I would know about. Are LED internal lights viable, for example? Air filters any good on the TDi's? This is the first diesel ive ever owned and love it so far, are there any tricks to eek a bit more out of the motor?

[Mirez]

I have full LED lighting on mine and yes, it looks a lot nicer

Air filters are a big no-no on the TDI, nearly all of them use an oil film and that contaminates the MAF and kills it. You can get more power out of the TDI by chipping it, relatively cheap (around Ã,£150) and takes the 115 to about 145 which is noticeable! If you go down that route though you need to make sure you have the secondary water pump working.

[dieselnewbie]

Sounds good, I got a PD130 tho -what can I expect (roughly)? I'll leave the filter then :-) . Anyone used a DTUK box on one of these?
Is it straight forward enough to do full LED swap mate?

[dieselnewbie]

Oh and sorry for being a noob, but where is the secondary pump situated?

[insanitybeard]

Auxiliary water pump is forward of the rear engine bay scuttle, behind the fuel filter- see here.

[Mirez]

Sorry, didn't read that - duh! I would suspect the 130 would go to about 160. Have a read here: Link - if you can do without the car for a couple of days that is by far the easiest option!

DTUK, well most tuning boxes work by fooling the ECU into thinking its got something when it hasn't (typically they whack the air flow up and the fuel rate down so the ECU thinks it needs to put much more fuel in to compensate) - personally, I'd leave well alone.

As above, the secondary water pump improves circulation. If you remap any car you make the engine work just a little harder and its therefore more critical that key things such as the cooling system, clutch and injectors are working well to start with.

Finally, yes - LED interior lighting is as simple as pull and replace with LED bulbs.

[insanitybeard]

Just curious, does the chipping make much difference to the torque curve/output Mark? (not that there's much wrong with it as standard IMO!)

[dieselnewbie]

Thanks for that, I don't really like the idea of a tuning box tbh, prob course a lot of problems down the line. LED lighting sounds easily do-able tho, what LED's are needed for the inside? Are they easy to get hold of?

[Mirez]

They claim a 70Nm increase, without a rolling road test before and after I can't say if thats true or not. It was certainly noticeable at the time

LED's you get on ebay, you need 5w5 Wedge and Festoon (I forget the size of the festoon, just measure one on the originals)