Heres a picture.
This was my first VW having owned many Vauxhalls over the years, Vivas, Astras, Cavaliers , Vectras etc. I have always done my own maintenance and had only ever taken a car once to a garage for work in 25 years , I had an issue with the airbag on my Vectra, having no diagnostic tools I was forced to goto the garage
.When looking for a replacement I looked into car diagnostics and found VAG-COM. Thus the search was on for an A4, Octavia or Passat. The A4's were too pricey, the Octavias not cheap enough compared to the Passats, so a Passat it was.
I first came across the forum when looking for information on why the car might be smelling musty, I originally put it down to the fact that the car had been standing for a while. After a few weeks of air freshners and no obvious issues I found the pollen filter seal was the culprit after finding an article on this site.
Carpet dried out, pollen filter seal replaced the car was a much nicer place to be, fortunateley I never suffered any other major issues.
Also the car had an issue with the temperature gauge bouncing up and down, again from this site I found the CTS was intermittent and changed it.
Decided to get some different wheels as the wellingtons were a bit tatty and spotted some B6 Catalunya wheels on Ebay almost new for jusst over £100, it of a bargain.
Car still not lowered and this was bugging me as the standard car is pretty softly sprung and rolls around like a barge compared to most of the Vauxhalls I had which were a lot more stiffly sprung.
Found a cheap spring and damper kit on Ebay 40mm lower about £180 all in and put that on.
The uprated shockers are still on my car today and working well. The 40mm springs were a little soft when the car was loaded with kids, a boot full of stuff and a Caravan on the back so switched to some Eibach 30mm springs which I got off Fleabay second hand for a really good price.
The Eibach 30mm drop rear spring was shorter than the 40mm drop rear spring as it's spring rating is higher the car handling wasn't quite as good but it got over speed bumps when loaded.
Fitted some HID lights on the dipped beam with a cheap £30 kit off E-bay and they make a vast difference
before
and after
The camera was set to manual so the exposure time and apeture were the same, so you get a good idea of the improvement, these were 6000K bulbs.
A few months later I actually joined UKPassats and started posting instead of skulking around in the background.
