mods you wished you'd never done!!

Don
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
56,782
Location
Cornwall
spawned from recent personal experience please list the mod(s) you are least impressed with, can be performance related, asthetics, function or anything really just let us know what you wasted your hard earned on and later lived to regret! Give reasons too I need cheering up :D

I'll start

Milsport stainless steel battery cover - from beginning to end this has been an utter pain in the bum and lethal to boot, it managed to turn my car into an arc welder when it shorted the terminals, its made my radio reset about 100 times and as result I am now an alpine config master so maybe some good things have come from it

Aftermarket HID kit (6000k jobbie), what a crock of poo, trying to convince myself these actually work is proving very difficult and I'm now a bulb down as well (winked a few times then croaked it), im certain these are a placebo effect and despite photographic evidence to the contrary I dont actually believe they work :p

those are my sources of pain, do please share yours :D
 
Thought my gearbox had gone and was in such a rush to get it fixed ( with very little money ) i drove to essex , collected one and had it fitted by a mate yesterday only to find the gearbox had been fine all along and that infact the passenger side drive shaft had infact gone !

So i suppose you could say -

Most

pointless

Mod

Ever

:p
 
one of my first cars was a mk4 escort, i had plastic 5 spoke hub caps, but they had big silver plastic bits between the spokes. I got some black spray paint and sprayed the extra bits to make them more 'real'!!

it looked so wrong!
 
LED sidelights.

Loads of sets, some I bought, some were warrenty replacements, all were a PITA. Ranging from ones that simply didn't fit into a 501 wedge connector, ones that lasted a couple of months, ones that lasted a couple of days, ones that were like a candle at 500 yards, "white" ones that were infact distictly blue and best of all ones that instantly caught on fire then blew my light fuse.

They had one thing in common, they were all crap and all ended up in the bin. For a small mod they ended up costing proper money and for what, slightly brighter whiter sidelights :o
 
lordrobs said:
LED sidelights.

Loads of sets, some I bought, some were warrenty replacements, all were a PITA. Ranging from ones that simply didn't fit into a 501 wedge connector, ones that lasted a couple of months, ones that lasted a couple of days, ones that were like a candle at 500 yards, "white" ones that were infact distictly blue and best of all ones that instantly caught on fire then blew my light fuse.

They had one thing in common, they were all crap and all ended up in the bin. For a small mod they ended up costing proper money and for what, slightly brighter whiter sidelights :o


oh god dont say that!

I purchased some LED sidelights today to match my crappy HID kit!

it gets worse :p
 
LED Sidelights. I must have tried 5 or 6 different types, none of which were white, some of which had a green tinge, some looked blue, most didn't fit - etc etc.
 
Lopéz said:
LED Sidelights. I must have tried 5 or 6 different types, none of which were white, some of which had a green tinge, some looked blue, most didn't fit - etc etc.

Yep, same here, I bought some (very cheap, as I work in parts) and they look lovely and white when connected to a battery but blue as soon as they are put in a headlamp.
 
This:

sti_deflector.jpg



The stainless steel bit (made by a fellow scoob owner) is designed to stop air flowing up over the top of the rad, and instead force it through the rad to improve cooling - which it does. But...

While the thing is fine at normal power, once you go over about 300bhp it actually stops enough air going into the intake (top left in the pic) and thus chokes off the power. It was removed halfway through the mapping session, about three weeks after I fitted it.


M
 
Once I screwed a nice chrome cover over the tail pipe on the old Mondeo.

It lasted about 2minutes as I decided it looked **** and threw it away.

Wasted about a tenner on that!
 
I put some spot lights on my 309 GTi, I then binned it head on into a tree before I ever got as far as wiring them up. That was fairly pointless:D.
 
Mintex 1144 pads on the front. Drove out of Pumaspeed, did a couple of "hard" braking runs and thought "miles better than the brembo originals, and £100 quid cheaper to boot".

Cue two weeks later (and since): the moment I brake lightly to drift up to a junction, everyone within a 1 mile radius is looking at my car for the wrong reasons. The dammned things make a noise like fingernails down a chalkboard combined with a pig being brutalized with the resulting noise fed through Spinal Tap's amps.

It's only the fact that I'm a stingy sod that they are still on there. :p
 
I remember putting the HID "Blue" headlamp bulbs in my motor few years back, (long before Halfords started selling them at exorbitant prices).

I still maintain they looked fairly cool - and truth to tell they did illuminate more at night, my plan fell flat on it's face when i forgot to swap em for standard one's come MOT time :(

"Sorry mate it's failed - your headlamp bulbs are illegal" = DOH ! ! ! :rolleyes:
 
Showing my age here... me and paw once put some twin 40 DCOE's on a standard Mk5 Cortina 1.6L

enjoyed it so much the core plugs popped out the block an hour later and that was that.

this'll be japanese to some of youse youngers guys :p
 
Linz said:
Showing my age here... me and paw once put some twin 40 DCOE's on a standard Mk5 Cortina 1.6L

enjoyed it so much the core plugs popped out the block an hour later and that was that.

this'll be japanese to some of youse youngers guys :p

not me ;)
 
Liverpool-Lad said:
Whats up with the HID kit?

it (the one working bulb, his partner died 12 minutes after fitting)illuminates anywhere but the road, currently dazzling owls and bats in the sky, total garbage and utterly useless
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom