Today I continued the effort of putting things back together.   As this is a repair and replace effort going on in conjunction with the buttoning up it’s taking a while longer than it normally would.

After the passenger side axle went in I also installed the new wheel well liner for that side.    I was also cleaning oil and dirt residue off the intercooler pipes and hoses so something like re-installing the IC’s entailed more than simply re-install the part.

I was pleased to observe that the accessory belt contained an Audi logo, I was concerned I’d find a no-name brand.  I had to hunt around for a little while in my spare nuts and bolts box to find a bolt to hold the AC compressor in place – a previous owner had chosen to install the part only using two of the three bolts.  I could see skipping a fastener or to on the wheel well liner, but not on something like the AC compressor.

I’m doing away with the K&N cone filter and BMW MAF housing, in exchange for and EPL MAF housing, adorned with 034 Motorsport stickers of all things, that was in the Nogaro’s trunk.  I’ll be reverting back to the stock airbox.

Another puzzling thing I found was that a prior owner had removed the bracket that the wiring harness attaches to beneath the coolant reservoir.  Without the bracket the harness hangs down closer to the exhaust manifold, not something I’m fond of, so I wrapped the harness in aluminum foil and tied it up underneath the the brackets for the reservoir so it has some protection from the heat below.

I still need to make up some joiner pipes for the exhaust, but I’m getting close to starting this S4 back and, and begin troubleshooting any remaining issues.

Today I tightened up the driveshaft.  I found one bolt to have some wear on the head, enough that I wasn’t comfortable trying to torque the bolt, so I swapped in a better condition bolt that I had lying around.

I then turned my attention to undoing the Evap System delete that some prior owner had done.

Thankfully whoever did the delete had not cut the wires to the pump and had also left the majority of the hosing in place, it was all bundled up and zip-tied to the bracket that used to hold the leak detection pump.

I reconnected what I could and put some new hose in place of the original hose that had been trimmed slightly and was no longer long enough.

I also installed a charcoal canister beneath the spare tire well.

Turning to the interior of the car I reattached the shifter.

I also installed a base tune onto the ECU.  The previous fueling setup on the car used a K&N cone filter attached to a BMW MAF housing with a Hitachi MAF sensor glued into place.  I’m anticipating that would be more challenging to get tuned versus starting with a hardware configuration that’s more standard and closer to something I’ve got an existing tune for.

Looking through a collection on BIN files I have from Nefmoto the Bertos Stage III file is a close match, it uses K04’s, 52# EV14’s, and an 85mm MAF housing with Hitachi sensor.  This car has a similar setup, aside from the air filter and MAF, so I will be swapping the Nogaro’s intake parts for a stock airbox attached to EPL MAF housing with Hitachi sensor.  Since I have a good MLHFM curve to use for the EPL MAF housing I’m hoping the base tune will give good initial results.

Today I got around to re-installing the Nogaro’s engine.  This was a longer pain in the ass than usual on account of the bone headed decisions made by some of the prior owners of this S4 and the donor car that I obtained the exhaust from.

I’ve never needed to install the engine with a stock set of downpipes so the extra long driver side pipe was a new challenge.  I imagine that on an unmodified exhaust the flex joint may give enough to allow the engine to be hoisted with the tip of the downpipe touching the ground, but still bending enough to not put too much strain on the downpipes or turbo’s.  In my case the genius who owned the exhaust before had it welded so that that it’s a single ridged piece.

To get the engine into the car I stuck a floor jack under the transmission and lifted it along with the engine.  Then once the engine was going into place I began to lower with the hoist and floor jack simultaneously.

Eventually it was time to connect the axles.  I then realized that one of the prior owners had gone with a rubber gasket on the driver side axle.  Lacking the adhesive that the cork style gasket uses this rubber gasket was now out of place, and encased in grease.  That thing staying in place during the effort to reinstall the axle was unlikely.  Fortunately I had a cork gasket on hand so I cleaned the grease off the axle and stuck the cork gasket into place.

When I got over to the passenger side I discovered that one of these prior owners had completely skipped putting the gasket on the axle.  Some people should not be allowed to do work on S4’s.  I pulled another cork gasket from the parts box and stuck it on the passenger side axle.

After some more maneuvering the engine was in place.  Getting this far had taken much longer than I had anticipated, so I stopped once the engine was on the mounts.