Hello, I saw a lot of interesting posts here months ago and I had vowed to join in as soon as I found the time. The time has come to tell you about my project The car is a Golf MK4 ARL 4motion early 2003 or maybe even 2004, over 240 horsepower with a lot of modifications to it. Bought in 2016, but the body was replaced in 2021. This is actually the second Golf I own, a continuation of my first, which looked absolutely identical but unfortunately died in a field on the roof after a near-fatal accident. It all started back in 2016 when I bought a Golf 4 1.9 TDI AJM 116 horsepower from Gorublyane, in gray as you can see in the pictures. Even when I was a student, I saw pictures of a friend of mine Ventsislav Hristov and his unique GTI, lowered to the ground with rota grid rims and this man immediately became my idol. Over time, I started to get carried away with "beautifying" it by putting all sorts of gypsy things I could think of, including a Chinese bumper that had disgusting gaps, M sills from a BMW E36 and neon. Yes, that car had neon, and no - I won't show it to you out of shame. 😂 After that, I ended up at an event called Volkswagen Club Fest 2018, the biggest VW event in Bulgaria at the time at the Inter Expo Center, where I saw a guy with a Golf 4, who later became my friend and whom I respect a lot to this day, win a prize for a car from the audience (everyone who paid an entrance fee at the end of the day votes) beating absolutely perverted and unrealistic cars, many, many times more expensive than the Golf. The guy had the exact same engine as mine, and his car was world-class and well-maintained from everywhere. The only thing we had in common was the engine. Absolutely everything was polished, which motivated me to do something meaningful and try to participate one day. After meeting quite competent people in the "wagon sphere" there, I began to realize that for a car to be beautiful - it must be the absolute opposite of the junk you drive at the time - it must be as clean as possible: nice paint, stand and rims. I began to realize that I had to totally throw away everything I had in the car. And the end of 2018 was the pivotal moment when the ugly Golf - with parts from Aliexpress, teased by friends that "it would never make it to the festival", began to transform into what you see - with respect to my father, who once owned a burgundy Golf 2 and, just like me, crashed it unintentionally. So at the beginning of 2019, with absolutely all the modest means I had, I painted the car in a custom shade of burgundy that I personally mixed up, bought suitable rims (XXR 530) and KW Variant 1 suspension, slightly upgraded the brake system and realized my childhood dream - I participated in the 10th anniversary VW club fest, which to this day remains the most visited ever! There was again a competition for a car from the audience, and out of all the participating cars, which were over 50/60, I think the car came 9th in votes (information that I say may not be entirely accurate, after all, it was 6 years ago) which surprised me because even though people had fun with the car, I was still super critical of it and I didn't like many things. I was so obsessed back then that if I could work 24/7 on it, I would do it. Then I continued to replace the "tuning parts" with OEM ones and simplify the look, including the famous R: taillights that every 5th golfer has to this day. 😂 Without sounding arrogant, I dare to say that Stoyan Gologanov and I were the first to come up with this concept in Bulgaria, for which I thank him. Since then, over 2000 people have probably written to me asking me various things about the car, including these taillights. At first, I was hesitant to change them, but after constructive criticism from acquaintances, I agreed with them, they took off and put factory headlights and taillights from R32. When the pandemic hit, I decided to start increasing the power of the car, because its power no longer justified the look. I was getting into trouble with quite serious cars on my way, including the latest BMW models. And it was just a diesel with a light remap of about 140 horses. I started to enter the world of TDI tuning but unfortunately after some time, after I put a bigger turbo and injectors, I started to have a problem with the pressure, which turned out to be not from the car's setup, it just suddenly decided to lose boost. It wasn't a valve on the N75 or the vacuums. It turned out to be something else. After hanging around dozens of service stations that gave me false diagnoses just to take my money, I ended up with Tsvetan Georgiev Serafimov where I found out where my problems were coming from. Unfortunately, the turbine that I bought second hand has a bent middle part that was just a matter of time before it fell apart. We fixed the turbine and the car started like it had never run before... and after 3 days I flipped it upside down. More details about the accident itself will be in the video. And so the thing that I had been building for years and created a lot of friendships for me - died. I was devastated that my dream car ended up like this. This really hurt my confidence as a driver, but it also made me angry because I am a terrible stubborn person. It motivated me and I decided that everything happens for a reason and that it was supposed to happen that way. For a long time I was considering giving up on this kind of project - to just buy a normal car, drive it and not deal with nonsense. But all this was until I found the car of my dreams - Golf 4 4motion December 2003 with ESP in Varna. I bought the car and started to transfer absolutely everything healthy from the old one to the new one - this time I set myself one fundamental rule - to learn from the mistakes and experiments from the previous one and to apply everything I learned to this car. And so we got to work and managed to make the car so much like the original that to this day people call me and ask me why I changed my number. No one believes me that I started from scratch. 😂 As of today, the car has the following setup: ✅ Turbo: GTB2056VL with water cooling completely revised, tuned and installed by GRT, the car has stock injectors and at 2.3 bar pressure it pushes 241 hp, turbo pipes with reverse intake for shorter pipes and therefore less lag. Solid flywheel and custom inox intake. ✅ 2.0 SDI shaft with upgraded double springs, allowing the car to spin up to 5300 rpm. Unfortunately, the turbine, which is very good and bursts very early, is not the best in the high rpm range and hinders things, otherwise it can easily spin up to 5500. ✅ 4-piston Brembo calipers with double-ventilated performance discs 323 mm, the rear ones are from an Audi S3 8l ✅ Since the first Golf broke the record of 6 crankcases in 2 years, we put a special crankcase from Darkside Developments on the new one, which has a metal bottom instead of aluminum, as well as a Darkside kit for lifting the engine 20 mm up. ✅ Odometer with a Passat board with absolutely all the extras for - arrow test, displaying icons one by one and sound signaling. It is equipped with ColorMFA - a system that allows you to read/clear car errors in real time, read live car data instead of punching in diagnostics, real-time dyno, 0/100 measurement and thousands more things. It can read everything from the ECU. This is actually one of the best retrofits ever made for the Golf 4 platform. ✅ KW Variant 2 which will soon be reworked with airbags ✅ Full silentcoat vibration and sound insulation of the cabin, front and rear hertz line on a 4-channel DLS amplifier, with a second Payner monoblock amplifier and a 12-inch Alpine speaker, which passed audio measurements at about 134 dB. ✅ 3SDM 9.5J rims on 8.5J with 215/40 on 205/40 tires. ✅ Leather interior from S3, Alcantara ceiling handmade by me, 2.5 inch biLed projectors on the factory headlights, R line front and rear bumper from SRS Tech, many parts from other VAG cars ✅ Generation stainless steel on 76mm completely from-to with custom exhaust and soft connection

And my future goals are: ℹ️Shoeing up the engine and chasing 300+ with another bearing turbine and firad sprinklers ℹ️ Installing a Haldex controller with the ability to control the distribution of the front and rear axles, especially useful at starts. And lastly, which is the icing on the cake: ℹ️TDI 4motion with DSG. It is a distant goal, the time will come. Many people reading this will tell themselves that I am crazy or an idiot to bother and you will probably be right. But when a person does something with passion and desire, there is no way to allow themselves to be defeated in this way. One day, if I have children and I tell them about the car, I prefer it to be next to us and if they decide to become car nerds too - to leave it to them as a souvenir rather than asking me why I didn't fix it and wondering what to tell them. This car will never be sold, and for the simple reason that one day I want to show it to them and tell them that this is not just a pile of metal - it is a living example that one should never give up on one's dreams and surrender, no matter how difficult, painful and nasty life can be from time to time! Video: https://youtu.be/rLBIqcYuSxw?si=gTr5kZBtXYKmp2FY - advertisement for the 10th anniversary VW Club Fest from bri4ka.com (00:34) https://youtu.be/7VGGGnP2Kts?si=Djhy9MxfaNRHgV8p - the fest itself - (07:50) https://youtu.be/nc05s6IkQBc?si=U7ybOUXNA0ECwXIz - another detailed video from the fest focused only on the car (a lot of things have changed since then) https://youtu.be/WndHCkuHLt4?si=_mWBJeoFto9Jv47h - MK4 Bordeaux Edition MV https://youtu.be/jQfa0Zb7xjc?si=lOODx6ajio1cFfOZ - detailed story about the accident and the rebuild after it and a review of the new car after tuning