TIP -> 6MT

Exhaust removed

Time to get started in earnest.  I removed the rear portion of the exhaust, the muffler components today.  I think working underneath the car I’m going to have a wrench in one hand and a can of PB Blaster or Liquid Wrench in the other to spray bolts with prior to trying to remove them.  The bolts holding the muffler clamps in place were fun.  I expected these to be difficult to break loose so I started off giving them a blast of liquid wrench and moved on to something else to give the penetrant a little time to work.  With the amount of corrosion that had formed on the bolts I was a little unsure of what the right size socket was to put on the nut.  It was a toss-up between a few sockets so I went into my stockpile of parts and pulled out the old clamp from the Santorin car.  17mm was a solid fit.  That, a breaker bar, and a bit of straining got the bolt started.  Sadly, the parts were so rusted I needed to use the breaker bar to have enough leverage to back the nut all the way off, a quarter turn at a time.

Muffler removed

The torx bolts that also hold the driveshaft support came out surprisingly easy, so much so that at first I thought I might have had the wrong sized Torx bit and was stripping the bolt head.Muffler removedMost of the 13mm bolts at the rear came out pretty easily, except for the one bolt that goes into the differential carrier and is partially blocked by the sway bar.  Of course the one bolt that requires a bit of maneuvering to get to would be the one that was really stuck in good.

Muffler removed

I was going to remove the heat shield that runs along the drive shaft but to my surprise the small 10mm bolts hold it in place were stuck good enough that I decided to give them a blast of liquid wrench.  I took a break at that point.

AgS4, TIP -> 6MT

Audi B5 S4 Pedal Assembly Removal

With things pretty set at the back end of the car I turned my attention back to the front and removing the pedal assembly.  The first thing I wanted to do was remove the brake fluid reservoir.  This turned out to be a bigger challenge than I’d expected.  I’d already drained most of the fluid so I set right into loosening bolts and undoing clamps.  After I had everything off that I could see it was evident that the reservoir was still attached somewhere because it wasn’t leaving the master cylinder.  The picture below shows why.

Master cylinder

The tab on the bottom of the master cylinder locks into a notch on the bottom of the fluid reservoir, shown below.

Brake fluid reservoir

The master cylinder blocks direct access to this so separating the two is a challenge.  I found that I could put a short wrench, roughly a 13mm, underneath the master cylinder and between the plastic of the reservoir and the cylinder so that I could pry the clip open. [That probably sounds easy enough but it took me quite a while to finally figure it out.]

Next I moved onto removing the pedal assembly.  Having already dismantled most of the interior I thought this should go pretty quick, but again I was wrong.  The brake pedal attaches to the master cylinder via a mechanism that in a perfect world would be removed per the Bentley manual and use a special tool.  I did not have any such special tool but I did have a write-up from someone who had gone before doing this.  They described backing a bolt off a part, but at first look it wasn’t evident to me what bolt this was.  After spending sometime trying to figure the puzzle out I concluded it must be the two nuts that appeared to tighten up against one another just behind the brake pedal arm.  I was able to get a 16mm wrench on the smaller of the two, shown below.

Brake pedal nut

And on the other I was able to get a small adjustable crescent wrench.  Afterward it occurred to me that perhaps a stubby combination wrench would have worked too.  The other nut is shown in the photo below still on the master cylinder rod.

Master cylinder rodIt did not take too much force to loosen the two, and then simply unscrewing the smaller (forward) nut freed the brake pedal arm from the cylinder.

Below are a few photos from the front end of the car.

Brake boosterBrake boosterWhere the brake booster mounts (1) and also where the slave cylinder line passes into the cabin (2).  I can only imagine the fun it must be trying to remove the slave cylinder line with everything in place on the car.

booster_hole

AgS4

Backing the subframe out

After lowering the subframe down it was necessary to raise the rear of the car high enough so that I could pull the subframe back and have the rear uprights clear the rear portion of the wheel well.

Jacked rear end

Dropped subframe

Subframe looking forward

Driver side subframe

Another driver side subframe

Jacked full view

With the subframe ready to be moved over to the Silver car I addressed another small issue on the Silver car.  The water temperature gauge had not seemed to move at all the one time I had the car running for more than a minute or so.  I thought perhaps the coolant temperature sensor was bad so I decided to remove the sensor from the Santorin car’s engine and put the sensor in the Silver car.  Getting the sensor out of the Silver prove to be a bit of a challenge.  After getting enough parts out of the way to have a clear shot at the sensor it took quite a bit of rocking the sensor back and forth to get it to break the seal with the coolant hard pipe and come out.

Coolant temperature sensorAnd the current state of the garage…

Garage picture

So far the following has been done:

  • All of the coilovers have been transferred
  • The front big brake kit (calipers and rotors and stainless steel brake lines) has been moved
  • The front control arms and uprights are swappped
  • The front sway bar swapped
  • Four of five wheels (includes spare) have been replaced
  • External mirror housings swapped
  • Rearview mirror installed
  • Ignition lock cylinder replaced
  • New cabin air filter
  • New engine air filter
  • New oil filter & oil
  • Swapped coolant temperature sensor

 

Audi B5 S4 Information and Testing