A little light winter reading to prepare for the spring car-work season...
A little light winter reading to prepare for the spring car-work season...
Snow-day update: Been commuting in the Audi regularly with nary a care - seat heaters work (even with the ripped upholstery), engine runs well, and there are only a few minor clunks. However, when I opened the hood to top-off the windshield-washer fluid, I was greeted with this melty-looking engine cover:
Now, I honestly don't recall if it looked like that before I bought the car, but I have been getting a slight whiff of something burning, but haven't seen any smoke, or other tell-tale signs of an engine-compartment fire. Didn't have a chance to pull the cover to investigate before our most-recent snowstorm, but the car is sufficiently buried now to allow for ample time to research possible causes of the under-hood heat before spring...
The inner control arms bushings will wear out fast/ tear if you tighten them fully while the car is in the air at full droop. Common mistake.
Tighten them up once the car is on the ground or with the wheels up on ramps. The rubber only has so much give. Tightening at full droop means they have excessive twisting force on them at full compression.
A new year and I'm finally getting back to work on the Audi. Been seeing the progress many of you are making on far more ambitious projects so I made a resolution to get this thing back on the road ASAP!
Thanks to all of you who post regularly for getting me motivated (that, and the 70+-degree weekend in Boston in January which happens pretty much never)
The car developed the standard Audi seized-rear-caliper affliction so I stopped driving it regularly last March.
A new daily driver (2019 Toyota RAV4 Adventure, which, to my amazement, I'm really enjoying), the kid's heavy baseball travel schedule, and a lump of BMW 633CSi (now sold) taking up the garage kept the Audi sidelined for most of 2019. Its long bout of inactivity resulted in a dead battery (starts when jumped, alternator puts out good voltage, battery voltage falls off quickly with the motor off), flat-spotted tires, brakes rusted together, and and some critters nesting in the intake.
Took advantage of the this past weekend's record warmth to get back to Quattro-land and start the process of getting the car back to road worthiness.
Step 1: De-critter: White fluff in the intake tube, piles of acorns in the cowl, and in the airbox. Audi was smart in have a mesh barrier between the intake side of the airbox and the filter, so there was no chance for errant crud to get sucked into the engine. Disassembled the intake plumbing and vacuumed everything out. I have to pull the battery anyway, so I undid the cowling and pulled the battery and battery tray to clean-up debris in that area.
Step 2: Get car in the air and assess other stuff: I have an AutoLift3000, but A4s of this vintage do not have a pinch-weld seam running the length of the car. Instead, there are jack points front an rear, just out of reach of the AutoLift's pads:
In order to use the lift, I built an "extended platform" with 2x8s and angle iron to get the car off the ground:
Now that it's up in the air, I could pull wheels and assess how crusty the brakes are. Left rear is the crustiest (parked next to a stone wall with little sun for most of the year):
Rebuilt rear calipers are on the way, along with pads (Hawk HPS - my long-time go-to for VW/Audis) and rotors x4.
Told my wife I can transition from noisy power tools to hand-tools and cussing for the brake replacement portion of the project, so I'm hoping there will be more opportunity to work on the car in small doses. For now, I've soaked everything in PB Blaster in an effort to minimize the cussing portion of the build...
Got another couple of hours in the garage this afternoon.
Of course, I had to try to start the car once I put the new battery in - fired right up, idles great (even with ~year-old fuel).
Once I get the brakes put on and give it an oil change, it will be back on the road. Waiting until spring to address suspension, bushings, and a timing belt if I decide it's a keeper....
Hoping to get away without having to change front calipers, but they turned out to be a real E36 M3 show....
Happiness is new brakes (at least one corner done). Added stainless brake lines while I was in there...
No wonder the rear caliper bolts took so long to get here. Guess I should have checked into why these weren't eligible for Prime shipping to Boston before I ordered them...
Finally had some time to get back to the Audi, even if just in dribs and drabs of time...
Since the front brake refresh went so well, I dove into the rears, only to hit some brick walls.
Like the fronts, the plan was to change rotors, pads, calipers, and flex lines. 3 out of 4 went easily. The brake lines kicked my butt.
There are two flexible lines on each side of the rear brake system - one from the caliper to the rear control arm (which connects to a short hard line), and one from the control-arm hard line to the hard line that runs to the front of the car. ALL of those connections were corroded solid - penetrating oil didn't help and vise grips didn't work. Ended up cutting the ends off of the soft lines going to the rear suspension and resigned myself to putting in new lines.
For the short hard line that sits on the control arms, I bought off-the-shelf metric bubble-flare lines. Since the shortest off-the-shelf line was longer than the stock line, I had to bend it up so that ends landed roughly where the original lines ended
The connections between the inner flex lines and the hard lines running the length of the car were even worse, and I had to cut the hard line. Since I couldn't get a replacement for the Audi brake line that runs the length of the car, I decided to buy some couplers and fab some short hard lines to connect everything. Unfortunately, the vintage flare tool I rescued from my parent's basement couldn't do bubble flares, 
but the tube cutter still worked! I got a cheap similar-looking flare tool from Amazon that could do bubble flares and set to work.
Here's one end (needs a little Dremel-too clean-up to get rid of the marks left from being clamped in the flare tool)
Flaring the ends of the lines still on the car required a little improvisation and many 4-letter words:
but I got it done.
Left side:
Right side:
With the brake lines done, I decided to take care of a quality-of-life issue with the car - buzzing rear speakers. This car has the Bose sound system with proprietary sub-woofers. Had to remove the rear package shelf (which generated more 4-letter words) to access the speakers. From years in the sun, the little "dome" on the speaker separates itself from the cone, which causes the buzzing. Both speakers looked like this:
Since 100% audio fidelity is not a requirement, a little Gorilla Glue took care of the problem.
Reinstalled both speakers, no more buzz...
Planned to bleed the brakes and get the car back on the road, but I had to change the hose on my brake-bleeder tool (I use a pressure bleeder, similar to the Motive tool, but it was a Bavarian Autosport-branded unit). In the process of changing the line, the nipple broke off of the cap that screws to the brake reservoir. Ordered a metal cap from Motive.
While I'm waiting, as is the fashion of several other build threads, I took care of a home-and-garden project. We bought a rain barrel some years back and I finally got around to installing it. I wanted it off the ground so that I could fill a watering can from the bottom of the barrel.
I had some old angle iron and a spare 2x8 and set to work. Cut the angle iron so that I could make a 2'x2' square, and sparked up my welder for the first time in about 15 years!
Some more cutting, welding, and grinding, a coat of "found" spray paint, and I had a barrel stand:
Note that the overflow tube is genuine BMW low-pressure power-steering hose left over from my ill-fated E24 project, so there is still automotive content here :-)
Was going to put the under-tray back on the car in preparation for getting the car on the road, but it was so gross from 20 years of oily grime build-up, I decided to clean it up a bit (which entailed a lot of scraping, Brakleen, and Simple Green).
Did manage to put the cowl pieces back in, so there was some progress in getting it to look more like a complete car. The wires are for a battery tender (and my vintage VDO volt meter is there to check that I have a good battery charge)
If the brake bleeder parts get here this week, I'm hoping to get the car rolling by the weekend.
Ah the wonders of New England. Pretty happy to not have to deal with that epic rust on every bolt anymore
Got things together enough to take the car off of the lift and take it for a test drive. Brakes were wicked squishy - probably more air in the system that I need to bleed out. I had the tires off and over-inflated for a while which seemed to get rid of the flat-spots that developed when the car sat.
Of course, Audi-ness had to rear its ugly head - hit a small bump in the road during my test drive and heard some metallic clattering. Pulled over and found this in the road
Looks like a piece of a rear spring. I drove the car home, into the garage, and shut the door. Will investigate more over the weekend, once I stop being mad at the car.
...and the Audi is sold. Off to be frankenturboed, or something, by someone upgrading from a rusty Passat. This may be the first time I came close to break-even on a car, too. I guess I'm due after taking a huge bath on my last BMW project.
Now, what should go in the garage next? I'm thinking older, simpler, RWD...
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