Fitted a boost gauge today and when i floor it the gauge goes straight to 18psi and then drops back to 14psi as it revs higher . So i would assume its not chipped ? Does that sound right .
Sounds about right for standard. Depends on the condition of the EBV and how the waste gate is adjusted though. I've seen chipped cars running that level of boost and standard cars running higher boost than that so just checking the boost by itself isn't a perfect way to work out what chip the ECU is running, although it can give an indication.
Standard is 0,5bar in 2nd, 0,6bar in Any other gear....
Only if something is broken.
Standard sustained boost (20vt) should generally be around 0.7 bar in 1st and 2nd due to the boost limiter and then 1.0 bar in other gears. Overboost for a second or two of around 0.2 to 0.3 bar higher than the sustained level is normal on most (but not all) standard 20vt coupes. Boost will gradually drop off in all gears above about 5.5K rpm due to the relatively small size of the standard turbo.
The only thing you can rely on is that not all identical coupes (even completely standard) will always behave exactly alike in boost characteristics. I've seen completely standard 20vt's running anything from 0.9 to 1.2 bar sustained boost and anything from 0 to 0.5 bar of overboost.
(Yes I know the ECU doesn't literally check the gear selected when limiting boost, we had this discussion recently already.
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Any member near you with a standard ecu you could borrow to test?
You can't just swap over the engine ECU as it's coded to the immobiliser box. You'd need to swap the engine ECU, immobiliser ECU + chip in the key.