The Project Pad

mr_aj_johnson wrote:Tuck it back into the engine bay a little bit and mount it on the pass side somewhere where the lines route well. Dryer ducting up to the hole in the front bumper. Easy peasy.

Well I've tried that, but the way the lines are shaped it's very difficult to do without either bending them to the point where I'd worry about them kinking, or having them hang way down under the car.

Long-term I'll probably use an aftermarket cooler with AN lines and fittings but I don't have the buxx for that right now.

mr_aj_johnson wrote:Got a box in the mail this week. You get my pm?

Yeah, I've been crazy busy but I promise I'll get back to you by the end of the weekend. I haven't really dealt with anything Megasquirt-related since I started the 80 in April so I need to mentally "shift gears" a little.

elaw wrote:Well I've tried that, but the way the lines are shaped it's very difficult to do without either bending them to the point where I'd worry about them kinking, or having them hang way down under the car.

I wish I had pics of my setup. It uses stock lines and hangs off the outside of the frame rail behind the fog light. Two pieces of steel strap bent to make a hanger that mounts from a single point- two existing bolts- on the frame rail.

I can mock it up and take a pic this weekend if you need.

And I have conquered the oil cooler demon!

Actually abandoning making the A/C work made the job _much_ easier.

Some pix... from the front:


From above:


And from the side:


Basically there are two brackets supporting it. The longer/rear one can be seen in the "above" shot, it connects to one of the studs that were formerly used to mount the A/C accumulator. There's also a short one in the front going from the forward/right end of the cooler to the back of one of the bolts that holds the lower crossmember on.

A little creative ductwork and I think I'll be set. Of course I haven't tried fitting the bumper since I did this, I'm sure it'll hit somewhere...

There's no way your bumper will interfere with that cooler.

+1 for a shitload of ductwork in order for it to be useful though

My AN line'd Earl's cooler price tag (this stuff adds up fast. Also bear in mind these prices are all for black anodized adapters and hose ends):
$102 for 16 row narrow Earl's cooler w/10AN adapters
$25 for (2) m18x1.5 to 10AN adapters
$70 for (2) 120degree 10AN swivel seal hose ends
$32 for (1) 90degree 10AN swivel seal hose end
$34 for (1) 45degree forged 10AN swivel seal hose end
$29 for (3) feet of Pro-Lite Ultra hose

So yeah, if you can find a used one in good shape - and yours looks WAY better than mine did (and I had a bent line), that's the most cost-effective approach

Oh, and you're too far north to need AC anyway

Toph wrote:There's no way your bumper will interfere with that cooler.

Would ya believe it does? :( Not much though, it just "kisses" the lower rear corner, should be fixable by tweaking the brackets.

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd think the Audi engineers put those little "pinches" in the lower sides of the bumpers just to keep people from installing oil coolers.

elaw wrote:

Toph wrote:There's no way your bumper will interfere with that cooler.

Would ya believe it does? :( Not much though, it just "kisses" the lower rear corner, should be fixable by tweaking the brackets.

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd think the Audi engineers put those little "pinches" in the lower sides of the bumpers just to keep people from installing oil coolers.

I can believe it does hit the bumper. Theres a lot more bumper cover than you would think on these cars.

My bumper has a lot less to it than I would have thought haha. I can see where it would hit though, now that you say that Eric.

no more ac? :(

Not for now.

I might possibly try to make it work later, but there's a ton of work involved in that, and I want to have the car drivable and debugged in the next month or so. The only good space I have to work on the car is outdoors and I just don't enjoy working on the car all that much when it's 35 degrees out and raining. And as for snow, when that comes I don't want to be working on the car, I want to be driving it! :-)

I hear you about working outside. Im hoping to have mine done in the same time frame.

Post-weekend report: there haven't been any huge steps forward, but a lot of small ones! 8)

Under the hood, this thing is actually starting to look like a car:


Although currently empty, the cooling system and the power-steering system are closed up and ready to go. I ended up using the radiator fan shroud from the 4K which was a bit rusty, so I spent a lot of time this AM stripping the rust off, priming, and painting it.

The idle/vacuum plumbing is almost all set too. You can just see there's a little copper pipe there going from the TB hose to the idle valve and from the valve to the manifold. Lines are in place to the brake booster and for crankcase ventilation, and there a fitting waiting for plumbing to the canister purge valve. The charcoal canister is in place and is plumbed to the fuel tank.

I also got wire and vacuum hoses run to the rear of the car for the center diff lock actuator and indicator. For the very short term, I'll probably just tee the lines together so the center locks when the rear does. Next step will probably be to install a separate electronic control-box thingy, switch, and indicator for the center diff. The final "if I ever get enough time" solution will be a neat little microprocessor-based thing I thought up. The idea is you'll have a locking button for each diff, and if you just tap the button it'll lock (tapping again unlocks it) and unlock automatically when the car exceeds a certain speed like the factory system. But if you hold the button down for a second or so, it'll lock and stay locked until you press the button again.

don't lock em together. Center is far more important than rear. Steal a selector switch from a 4k.

Ps where are the coils?

In particular try to find the switch from an '84 4KQ (or an URQ I think), it's a straight pull/push type rather than the rotary knob like the 85-87 4KQ so easier to mount I think.

mr_aj_johnson wrote:Ps where are the coils?

In a box in the basement!

One of the two big outstanding things to be done in this car is installing the Megasquirt. It's not as bad as it sounds though, as I pulled the harness intact from my other car so it's mostly a matter of stuffing it in there and making the various conections to the car's wiring harness.

Re ignition specifically, I actually have two options and I'm tearing my hair out trying to decide which one to use. Option 1 is the "LS" coil setup I used in the 4K:

It's a perfectly good setup, but IMHO looks a little messy and requires me to drill more holes in the firewall which I'd kind of like to avoid doing. I wasn't so averse to drilling holes in the 4K since it was a rust bucket anyway.

Option 2 I don't have a photo of, but it's a set of VAG coil-on-plug coils. The big plus with those is there would be no plug wires or anything else taking up space in the engine bay. Minuses are that they apparently aren't as powerful as the LS coils, and I have to make and install a special driver board for them since the Megasquirt can't drive them directly.

Like I said, I haven't decided which I want to use. But I actually installed connectors on the coil harnesses and the MS harness so I can change my mind any time.

mrmotorhead13 wrote:In particular try to find the switch from an '84 4KQ (or an URQ I think), it's a straight pull/push type rather than the rotary knob like the 85-87 4KQ so easier to mount I think.

Well the good news is I got my hands on another of the modules used in the B3 to control the diff lock, so my switching for the center lock can be electrical and not vacuum. Electrical switches are a whole lot easier to come by in various shapes and sizes than vacuum switches!

What I'm actually thinking about doing, if I can figure out a way to replace the legends on the switches and have it look nice, is to lose the thing between the front seats and instead control the diffs with switches that live in the same area of the console as the switches for the fog lights etc. I figure I can mount an LED in each switch to show the diff's locking status.

Well today we're one for two in our battles.

First, the one I won: oil-pressure senders. I now have two!


Yes, I finally got the correct adapter to put a regular M10x1.0 oil-pressure switch in the lower hole on the AAN. There's a dealer part that will do that, but I hate ordering from them and not knowing how many weeks I'm going to be waiting for it to show up. So after a lot of searching I found this: http://www.touratech-usa.com/Store/238/ ... er-M16x1-5 which fits perfectly and even comes with a seal ring.

I can't remember if I posted about it before, but rethreading the generic VDO gauge/light sender also worked fine, so now I've got the complete setup with the gauge and dynamic oil-pressure warning system fully functional. The only difference I'm aware of between this and OE is that the "low-pressure switch" (ie the gauge sender) will close (and give a warning) at a higher pressure than the OE one, which is more conservative and thus safer.

The battle I lost was between my exhaust-pipe expander and the urquattro midpipe I'm putting on this thing. That thar pipe is pretty stout, and the expander broke before it could do its job. Having worked with a lot of stainless pipe, this isn't the first time this has happened. So tomorrow I'm off to the local muffler shop to have them expandify the pipe a little so it'll fit over the reducer hanging off the rear of the cat.

So things have been up-and-down over the last few days. Spent a bunch of time cutting the pipes off my rotted urquattro mid muffler to replace it with a Magnaflow. Measured, cut, measured again, cut again, welded, lathered, rinsed, repeated about 5 times. Finally got it all welded together and fitting reasonably and then I realized I forgot to put the flange on the rear pipe! :frustrated: So we'll be having a major do-over in that department.

And here's my dumb question for the day: the front bumper where it goes into the big "clips" that hold it on the sides... is it supposed to slide into the clips, or do you put it in position first and _snap_ it into the clips? I'm sure I could figure it out by trial-and-error but if "error" means breaking a clip that would be bad...

Lastly, some news from Megasquirt land. I don't have any pix yet but the MS and it's wiring are 85% installed. I temporarily hooked power to it and more or less expected it to fire right up, but no such luck. :(

It turns out the issues were twofold. Issue #1 is the "finickyness" of the Audi crank trigger vs. Megasquirt. A lot of head-scratching, testing with a 'scope, and tweaking of resistor values fixed that. The second issue? Well, uh... let's just say these engines run a whole lot better when the ignition coils are wired in the correct order. :tard:

But the bottom line is IT RUNS! It's a teeny tiny bit loud with only the downpipe, but we'll get that fixed eventually...

Yeah go figure. Firing order who needs it..... Just a note... If you go waste spark you need a differnt firing order as well

The bumpers slide back on those plastic clips.

Also, your tstat to radiator hose can be one piece by using a 4k hose. At least I think the one I'm using is from a 4k, and assuming you have a 7a outlet.

The title of this weekend's work session was "fun with wiring"! :-)

The relays that controlled power to the MS setup in the old car were inside the car, but in this one they want to be under the hood. Also at some point I want to relay the headlights. And I don't like the idea of fuses and relays being out in the open subject to water spray and other crud under the hood. So what to do?

"What to do" is a neat little relay+fuse box grabbed from a Saab at the junkyard!

First we make a little mounting bracket, nothing fancy here:


The box clips onto the bracket and can be easily removed for access to stuff underneath it. The relay+fuse panel comes out for wiring:


...and in place, looks like this:


On top there's a nice cover to keep water, oil, and stray bears off the electronics:


The most coolest thing is that box already contained all the headlight-control relays and fuses from the Saab, including DRL functionality. So I just need to pop a headlight relay in there, do a little wiring, and I'm all set.

Oh and one more photo for your amusement:

It's actually starting to look like a car!

I do think the bright aluminum power steering pump pulley looks a little funny behind the grill... I might have to subject it to a little rattle-can color correction.

The car is actually getting close to being drivable. The exhaust has been kicking my a$$ but I'm close to having it figured out. With two Magnaflows and a cat on there it's surprisingly quiet which is how I like it. Gotta finish that up, button up the Megasquirt, put in some rear brake pads, put wheels on, tighten all the bolts that need to be tightened with weight on the wheels, and I can go for a drive! Although to keep the cops happy I'll probably throw some license plates on it too.

Then comes trying to reassemble the interior... :tard:

This is a little out of order but here are a few more random photos. I've been snapping pix like crazy of this project, but have been a little remiss about posting them.

First... we have an intake!

No laughing at the PVC unless you're volunteering to make me something better out of aluminum! I know it looks silly but it works, and at least I replaced the cheesy corrugated hose from the 4K with some nice silicone. The PVC *will* get replaced eventually...

Next we have COPs:

Nothing too innovative there... following in the footsteps of many others. I did get the cover to fit on top of them with some milling, but that makes for a pretty boring picture.

And I'll leave you with a couple of shots of the intercooler plumbing - it turned out pretty well!

Well im glad to see that after buying those fogs off me you were able to use them! Looking good.

Heh... they're actually not even installed yet! If you squint real hard, you can see there's a hole in the passenger-side light.

I'm focusing on getting the car drivable first, then have a bunch of cool exterior cosmetic stuff to do. E-code headlights, the fogs, taillights with yellow turn signal lenses, new trim. And maybe somewhere along the line a wash and wax!

Gotta fix the front passenger's outside door handle too - it's decided to start sticking like crazy. Does anyone know if that's fixable from outside with a shot of lube or am I going to have to tear the door apart?