had my flywheel balanced via merlin motorsport at coomb, tho piston broke did the machening
No you didn't, it was machined by Piston Broke and then balanced by an unknown party through InterPro at Thornbury.
Mine was lightened and balanced by
http://www.jnlracing.co.uk/ when I had my head breathed on.
There are two choices when balancing, really.
Either you can balance the flywheel on it's own, or you need to balance the flywheel and the complete rotating mass of crank, rods and pistons, oh and the clutch ,too.
I think it's safe to assume that VW build the engines as a 'built' unit, so the balancing tolerances are resonably close. As Danny's said they fit a number of different types of flywheels to the motors, so these are probably made and balanced separately. Likewise, the clutches would be manufactured and balanced at another factory, completely separately. The benefit of the lightened flywheel is most easily accessed by just getting the unit lightened and balanced. My and Danny's flywheels haven't torn the motors to pieces yet, although as eny fule no, I do drive like a girl and am frankly, rev-o-phobic.
Depending on the application, the cable-changer does have another great benefit, in that it allows you to re-position the shifter mech nice and high up, which makes quite a big difference to how fast you shift. We did Danny's some time ago and I will definitely do mine when I do another batch of work on my car, only I'll go even higher than his, so the shifter falls to hand even better.
If the motor and box are out I would say 'fit a cable-changer' - it's going to be a pain to have everything out again if you blow up the box shortly after. Plus the CDA box, although quite leggy is a well-matched set of ratios to the application. The Toledo I killed recently worked very well with this set of cogs and unless you're taking the car on track regularly and *want* sprint gearing I'd say stick with stock on that front.
