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After reading that some of the VAG mufflers can be really heavy and wanting to free things up anyway I went ahead and deleted the muffler from the stock tail section that I was still running, We put in a cut just in front of the muffler which we flanged and then flanged the stock muffler once removed so that I could swap between the straight pipe and OEM if I ever need to. The effort all felt justified once we got a look inside the OEM muffler from the engine side. The pipe is literally plugged closed and the only way the gases can get out into the outer chamber with the twin pipe exits is for the gases to push out sideways through the louvres. My mech said it was singularly the ****e - est muffler he had ever seen and I regretted straight away that we bothered flanging it because it will probably never go back on. The negative of its design is that it uses contorted gas flow to be quiet rather than loads of packing and was way lighter than we'd thought approx. 8kg. In went the flanged 60mm aluminium pipe + flange and its sorted.
Result is a more noticeable idle but completely inoffensive, a bit of a burble on decal at traffic speeds, no real droning on cruise (its just louder so the resonator is doing its thing still), but when you get up it if revs rise linearly then sound rises exponentially. Its encouraging me to drive more sedately on the road which after being relieved of some license points recently is a good thing I 'spose. Best thing though is that the top end feels a little better but mostly what I'm noticing is that in a burst up through the gears, the little bit of lag that was there when you grab third isn't there. We figure that by the time you go to grab third that the muffler had successfully bottled all the gases up against it and had created sufficient back pressure to slow the spool in that gear. So that that has improved is great. It just feels snappier really.
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