S40 Tuning help
 

Hello, so I have a 03 S40 and I was wondering where I could buy a ECU hand held tuner. I would pay to have it tuned but I am a student and money is tight, plus I want to be able to work on the car by myself as much as I can. I have already gone through Stage Zero (new spark plugs, oil, oil filter, air filter, fuel filter, etc). I really don't want to mess up my car and help on what to do next would be nice. Thank you.

the Gen-1 S40s are pretty hard to find sources for tuning the ECU on the 1.9t. The only ones I've seen are "piggy-back" designs and not the soft-loader types available for the Gen 2's (2004.5+ with the 5 cylinders). Brands to look at include Rica, Upsolute and BSR.

Other than that other things to consider are adding a larger downpipe (again sourcing for the 1.9T may not be easy) and adding a 14T turbo (these can be found used on some other Volvos - but there's a trick to turning the flange to make it it that you'd have to read up on. You can also consider rebuilding a 12T from another 1.9 and install the rotor/impeller from a 14T - ARD Tuning is a good resource to see if that's feasible. The goal here would be to make the car like the 2.0Ts from Europe which have about 200 HP in the high pressure turbo design. Too bad that model never came to the US.