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.

The Nogaro showed up with a catless exhaust setup, not something I was thrilled with, so I began looking into options to get a different setup on the car.

Another local S4 owner has a ‘project’ car they recently acquired from an owner who had made questionable decisions to it as well. The exhaust on that car had catalytic converters, so we made a swap.

What arrived was a one piece exhaust, yep solid pipe all the way from the turbo flange to the monster tip.  Not a conducive setup for engine installs on jackstands.  I took a sawzall to the pipe and removed the OEM couplers that had been welded in place connecting the stock downpipes (with exhaust dumps!) to the frankenpipe.

1. I’ve installed the stock downpipes onto the turbos.
2. I scratch my head each time I look at the exhaust dumps welded into the stock downpipes.
3. I had to MacGyver some nuts and bolts to get the downpipes to attach to the mounting brace on the transmission.
4. I put proper turbo studs and nuts on in place of the collection of nuts and bolts that were used before to attach the downpipes to the turbochargers.

I had to marvel at the size of the muffler on this mash up of pieces.

I’ll admit to being the driver of a unfitting exhaust tip for a Audi B5 S4.  The 034 single pipe has a fairly large exhaust tip, I’ve not brought myself to pony up the money to get the dual tip setup, yet.  But what I’ve got on my Silver S4 is nothing like this behemoth.

Maybe it’s just the round muffler that exaggerates the absurdity of this exhaust tip.

Then again, maybe the tip is absurdly large.

While moving some wiring around I managed to break one of the arms of the spider hose.  On my Silver S4 I’d converted over to a silicone hose setup and had some leftover hose on hand, so I did a repair and added in a silicone arm to the spider hose.

Another thing I did was ‘undo’ the N249 delete, reinstalling the parts to operate that system.

The prior owner had also tapped the boost gauge into the FPR line, not my first choice given the importance of maintaining correct fuel pressure and my desire not to jeopardize that pressure.  So I added a port on the N249 hoses for the Boost gauge.

Thus far I’ve spent all of my time focused on attending to components accesible from the vehicle exterior, so I snapped a few photos of the interior which is in pretty decent shape.  Not all that surprising since the car only has 92k on the odometer, low for a B5 S4.

The car had a Podi steering column gauge pod in the trunk, that will become the home to the boost gauge that was poorly placed in the center vent.

The car was delivered with a new battery, so new the old one is still on the floor of the back.