S2 Avant -93

[Antsa]

Really nice work on the pump wiring and setup.

Thanks Greg Automotive wiring is weirdly satisfying.

[Greg_S]

Really nice work on the pump wiring and setup.

[Antsa]

I also relayed the headlights before the painting happened but got too excited about the shiny panels so I forgot to mention it. No pictures takes because that is pretty much just a loom spaghetti The relays were placed in the aux relay carrier under the dash.

Some voltages before and after. A big improvement I would say

Before

Battery 14.2 V
Dipped 12.35 V
Main 10.86 V

After

Battery 14.2 V
Dipped 13.86 V
Main 13.07 V

[Antsa]

My new doors did not have the "rail" for the additional seal so I had to do a little cut/paste


No chance getting the plastic fastener on the seal out from the door without braking it. Fortunately AT had new seals in stock.

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The rail for the seal was easy enough to take away from the old door

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I took an angle grinder to make the back side flat and to ensure adhesion for the panel bond

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Same thing for the door side. Here I had to use a Dremel with a small cylindrical sanding bit

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Panel bond and clamps

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I rand out of clamps and mole grip when doing the second door so I had to improvise

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After the panel bond was cured the small rust spots were sandblasted and etch primed. After that followed a coat of sanding primer, polyester filler for dents and a couple of more primer coats. The primer was block sanded with P400 followed by P500 using a DA sander.

I also was able to do some painting. Here are the fenders about to receive base coat

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Base coat on followed by a clear coat. I'm pretty pleased how they came out


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Here the fenders receive their second coat of clear after wet sanding them first. The doors also got their first round of paint. They will be wet sanded and flow coated too.

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Fenders after flow coating. Pretty much zero orange peel and this time I got away without the ***** fisheyes


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Some sunbathing for the panels because it was a pretty day and I don't have access to painting chamber to bake the panels


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[Antsa]

Nice work! And I'd never considered where the wagon's battery sits, a great spot.

Yes it does make routing the wires pretty easy if you leave out section between rear seats and the pump

Where do you go look to find those new small components?

Wires and the fusebox are from vehicle wiring products and the terminals & housings are a TE Connectivity product ordered from Mouser

[Lago Blue]

Nice work! And I'd never considered where the wagon's battery sits, a great spot. Where do you go look to find those new small components?

[Antsa]

Did the fuel pump relaying today. Not that I needed it right away but now it's ready for future upgrades.

Routing the wires from the battery to relay under the rear seats. I used 4mm2 tinned thin wall cable from battery to relay and 2.5mm2 from relay to fuel pump, as I could not pass the thicker wires through. Propably the 4mm2 wire gauge way overkill but at least it's enough.

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I used a separate fuse box which uses these crimp terminals + seals

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I found a reasonable mounting point next to the diff lock unit

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The fuel pump feed wire has seen better times...

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So every wire was replaced. I had a little hard time feeding all the wire from to pump under the rear seats but managed to do it after a bit of fiddling

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Finally trough

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Lovely wire spaghetti Some speaker cable there as well waiting for rear door speakers somewhere in the future

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Fuel pump connector got some new STP terminals

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And fitted

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Old fuel pump feed wires were cut and fitted with TE Posilock terminals and housings

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I wanted to use a relay that has screw terminals for power and found this Bosch unit. And it is a straight fit to the diff lock unit retaining plate!

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And that completes the fuel pump relaying. At first the car did not start but I quickly remembered that I did not install the fuse Fuse in and fired straight up Next job is to relay the headlights.

[Rikki Kitto]

Shocking how rubbish some quality of modern parts is,(I had to change ball joints after only 18 months)
I like the numbered cups idea, simple and effective

[Antsa]

I have been a little lazy updating the thread Cv joint boot have been fitted a while while back and the car has now passed mot. Some pictures:


Driveshaft out

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Cv joint disassembled and parts cleaned

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My system of keeping the balls in order I marked the the inner race, cage and the outer race before disassebly.

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Quality of todays parts. I think these are ~2 years old

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Greased and assembled

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This was the drivers side and as the right side has the same brand cv boots, they will have to be changed soon as well.

[Antsa]

The Jetex exhaust system arrived and it was fitted yesterday. I was in a little hurry so no welding was done (I don't have any welding equipment myself), but I was able to mate the Jetex system to current one.

Previous "custom" exhaust out of the car

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There actually was a little hole


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This is the current stainless catback system from Jetex. No underside pics since all of the work was done on axle stands and there is not too much space underneath to take photos


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The Jetex system was pretty straight forward to install. It matched the oem exhaust hangers nicely. But while fitting the exhaust I noticed that both of the rear inner cv joint boots were torn. I replaced them two years back with SKF items so I thought they would last longer. The quality of today's parts is just . Boots now ordered from Audi and they will arrive next week. Let's hope that those last a little longer.

[Antsa]

Thanks for the tip. Hopefully they will be ok until june, my plan is to replace the rear quarter panel and and a little section from underneath the car. The rear end will need complete disassembly for that and it would be good time to stop any rust issues.

[Lago Blue]

Hi Antsa,

If I may suggest, particularly if you're driving this in the winter and haven't treated these two areas already, that you may want to (and perhaps, at least WRT the first instance, only if you later decide the KW's are too firm, however as the B6's are still too tall to simply re-install, and you then don't want that perch to by then be well seized for instance!) as follows:

a) Disassemble this coil-over and remove the spring's lower alloy mount which will expose the snap-ring it rests on), remove that too and spread some anti-seize in the ring groove, in the alloy perch and then reassemble, do wax-oil that alloy perch's exterior also; &

b) Remove any existing rust on or in the big black steel upper-perch bracket, particularly on the flat inboard side, as this area, bolted close against the inner-fender is a notorious rust-trap that untreated, will cause your brackets to have to be replaced. Repaint properly as required and treat with wax-oil.

Cheers sir!

[Antsa]

I also found the same thread about the ride height. It looks a bit silly now

[newsh]

Someone else had this issue with the rear ride height recently. Was it Josh?
I believe Bilstein changed them to the correct ones.

[Antsa]

So this week was MOT time. As per usual some faults were found. Rear left shock absorber was dead and the exhaust pipe was rusted through before the rear silencer. So I ordered some new bilstsein shocks and a Jetex catback exhaust system.

Today was time to fit new shocks. They are bilstein B6's

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Just jacked the car up and took the oem shocks out. They were pretty tightly fitted to the lower arms so I had to give it a few good whacks to make it loose.


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Had to compress the spring to get the old shock out from the strut.


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Bilstein fitted. The lower spring perch sits roughly 2cm's higher on these than on the oem's. So I had to compress the spring even more to fit them. It was a little scary since I only got some cheapo compressors but I managed to it The other low side is that the car sits a little higher now and looks somewhat funny. I decided to let it be, since my plan is to fit KW coilovers in the future. I could get someone to do a new groove for the spring perch snap ring but I thought it is not worth it since this will not be the permanent solution.


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And fitted to car


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New exhaust is also on its way so probably I will start fitting it next week. It needs a little bit welding to make it fit to current piping.