Here We Go Again- Building Another Audi

[19birel]

Yay to getting her on the road! I love these B8.5s lights. Following to see how these age, I've always wanted an A4 Avant.

If they sold the B8 Avants here with a manual gearbox I would've tried to hunt one down, I've always loved the Avants too but wasn't willing to give up my third pedal for one haha.

This thing is gorgeous!!

Thanks man!

Looks great, love the contrast of the grey sport seats against the black.

Thanks! The interior-spec is one of my favorite things about this car, it's gonna be a pain to keep clean but it'll be worth it haha

[hinrichs]

Damn dude it looks great, good job getting it back together.

[19birel]

Damn dude it looks great, good job getting it back together.

Thanks man!

[ljason]

I needed to thank you for this great read!! I certainly loved every little bit of it. I've got you bookmarked as my Homepage to check out new things you post…

[19birel]

So I've put about 2k miles on it thus far and she's been driving great. I took the car to the dealership for a much needed alignment and to have a recall done, but so far no issues!

Still debating on what color to paint the BBK before I install it (waiting on warmer weather), I between Yellow, Red, and Lime Green. Here are some random pics.







Side note, I'm dying to detail this thing. Going to ceramic coat it as well as apply PPF to the front of the car to protect the new paint after a full correction.

[19birel]

Well as things would have it work and school have been preventing me from getting much done on the car mod-wise but the bug has been itching so I decided to scratch it with a couple budget mods.

First one was tinting the amber reflectors in the headlights. I did this on my E60 and it looked so much better. While I'd ultimately like to disassemble the headlight housings and make paint the reflectors grey (to mimic E-Codes) this is a quick quick temporary improvement and It didn't cost me a dime since I just used leftover tint film from the BMW!

Next thing I did was work on improving the shifter feel, BFI sells a nice heavyweight shift knob but it's $150 so I took the budget route instead and filled my stock shift knob with lead shot used for weighting a fishing line



That's an extra 50grams of lead added to the inside of the knob plus some hot glue to keep it all from rattling like a maraca




Shifter feels much better now, which is great considering this mod cost less than $5! I wish the shifter height was a little shorter but for now this is perfect.

I've just hit 5k miles since getting her on the road (current odo 62k miles) so I'm gonna order some Liqui Moly, a fresh filter and some spark plugs as well since she's due for those too. Once the semester ends I'll have more time (and money) to get this thing prepped for summer.

And a semi-recent pic (still in desperate need of a good detail lol)

[hinrichs]

Great idea for the shifter. Bmw had a hack for that with a shift rod wrapped in solder lol.

[19birel]

Great idea for the shifter. Bmw had a hack for that with a shift rod wrapped in solder lol.

I'm gonna have to try the solder as well haha

I love little home-brew mods like that, sometimes it's nice to do a simple, cheap, and fun project that still yields a benefit of some sort haha

[Graphitemk6]

Looking pretty good, I like the color. As for the caliper color you can't go wrong with a deep metallic red

[19birel]

Little update! I threw in some new plugs, went with the NGK Iridiums. These will be good if/when I decide to get tuned, but are perfectly fine for stock application as well


Then I installed a dipstick (kinda funny I can consider that a "mod" lol) and gave her a fresh filter and some Liqui Moly Synthoil. Switched from leichtlauf because I prefer to run an OW oil for when the temps are colder and because it's a group 4 base oil.



Also did a rear debadge (kept rings & Quattro badge), cleaned up some sticker residue, did some paint touch up, and fixed my license plate bracket (the screw points at the top had fallen out). The end result was that the rear of the car now looks much cleaner!

Before



After



Also swapped my work plate frame for the ILLEST one I bought a while back, not sure how long it will stay though haha

Car also started dumping coolant everywhere, water pump and thermostat seals had perished. Annoying, but now I can check that off my list of things I need to worry about in the future. My CQuartz UK 3.0 ceramic coating arrived as well, the next nice weather weekend we have I'll do a paint correction and apply it.

[19birel]

So I've always thought that E-codes were one subtle mod that makes a tremendous difference to the appearance of these cars. Unable to justify buying E-codes I decided to do the next best thing, take apart my NA-spec lights and paint the reflectors!

To remove the lens I used a heat gun which worked quite well. I practiced on my spare light beforehand using the oven method and melted part of the housing so I played it safe by using the heat gun and it worked great. Having trim removal tools to pry the lens away from the housing helps a lot as well!

Here is the bezel with the reflector in it. I tried to remove the reflector but it became apparent that I would likely break it so I masked it off while still attached to the bezel




Scuffed it up with some sandpaper and then hit it with a couple coats of BMW Silver-Grey Metallic paint (had it laying around from my old 5series)





All put back together! I reused the adhesive, just reheated it with the heat gun. It's been a couple weeks now and still no condensation or anything in the lights!


To top things off I finally got around to doing a full paint correction on the car and applied CQuartz UK 3.0 ceramic coating, here's the finished result!

Then this weekend I did a 600mile round trip to Watkins Glen, NY for some hiking!

Parked up at the campsite

The car ate up the miles, what a great highway cruiser. It was caked in mud and bugs when I got home too, but the CQuartz ceramic coating made everything wipe off with ease and after a pretty basic wash it looked as it did the day I detailed it! Can't recommend this stuff enough!

On another note I've noticed by steering getting a notchy feeling [o_o] . I have read that there are a bunch of potential causes to this, one of which being the exposed intermediate steering shaft requiring a good cleaning and some lubrication. I'll do that Wednesday when I'm off work and report back, hopefully that solves it because I'd rather get tyres for the new wheels than spend money on repairs [:p] As always stay tuned for more!

[hinrichs]

Headlights came out great.

[19birel]

Headlights came out great.

Thanks! Easily one of my favorite visual mods so far and much easier to do than I originally thought

[19birel]

So today I tackled the notchy steering issue. So far it seems to be solved with $20 with of Brake Clean and Deep Creep

This knuckle here is the culprit, I forgot to take a before pic (this is after I cleaned it) but it was covered in black gunk which is likely why it was binding up


I then sprayed it with liberal amounts of deep creep from a couple angles to make sure it was nice and lubricated, and after taking it around the block it feels good as new! I'll probably hit it with more deep creep tomorrow just for good measure.

Here are a couple random pics I took recently

My next move will likely be ordering paint for the A7 bbk here in the next week or so and get that installed relatively soon. After that things will slow down as a save a set of tyres to put on the new wheels that I've had in my shed with the bbk all these months haha

[19birel]

So everyone says that the CR15 brace is a must have for these cars. Knowing what a strut brace did for my old MKIV Golf I figured that the CR15 would provide a similar improvement. Only thing was, unlike a traditional strut brace the CR15 is a straight aluminum bar that goes behind the false firewall, a secondary strut brace so to speak. So, instead of shelling out $150 for one, I went to Lowes and bought $12 worth of aluminum to construct my own.

Here is where the brace is supposed to sit, over top of this factory brace that primarily acts as a mounting bracket for the positive battery terminal and the washer fluid bottle.


And here it is with my custom piece installed

Relatively simple to make, just took a little while to get the holes measured correctly and drill everything out. As far as functionality goes, it's great! When the front end loads up around mid-corner you can feel the extra rigidity which translates into a little extra front end grip (which these cars need mid-corner) and a more direct steering feel. I would say that the difference is worth what they ask for the legit CR15, but if you have some time, a drill, and a dremel you can have yourself a nice bargain mod!