Last time we spoke I was, well, probably doing everything entirely the wrong way. The front end was all off, the cambelt tensioner had de-tensioned itself in a fairly spectacular way, and some umming and ahh-ing was going down, accompanied by mammoth quantities of tea and swearing.
And to be honest it carried on like that, including various attempts by the parts suppliers to actually furnish me with the CORRECT bits, until suddenly the stars aligned and Project Audinary burst into life once again. Click the jump for all the gory details.


Every workshop manual I’ve ever encountered describes changing a cambelt in as complicated a way as is physically possible. The Haynes book for the A4 is no different.
After the various steps for disassembly which are, of course, followed to the letter, it then tells you to lay seven candles out and draw a pentogram on the floor, bake a round of gingerbread men and secure the services of a pheasant on a leash. Then, with cylinder # 1 at TDC, hop thrice on your left leg and shout “SKRONK” nine times.
Rather than doing any of this, and performing any of the million little checks they suggest to make sure the belt goes on correctly, I figured why not mark the belt and cogs as they are now, count the teeth, mark the belt and re-fit it exactly as it came off? I did this, swapped the belts and everything seemed alright. So far, so good.

When fitting the new tensioner (the third different one I had been supplied with, it took three attempts before they got it right…) I wanted to make sure I did it properly, so I looked up a torque value for the two bolts, and got it quite profoundly wrong. Though I was only going for a really low torque figure, it obviously wasn’t low enough, and both the bolts (seen above on the right) sheared and freewheeled. New ones were sourced (strangely from my Dad’s tub of random car bits, as if waiting for this very day) and were tightened to a torque value of “Enough” as advised by the guys on Audisport.com.

The next, frightening thing considering what had happened before was pulling the pin out of the tensioner. I gingerly tugged and CLICK….all OK, no problems at all.
All good. Time for reassembly to commence.
The new waterpump and thermostat were already in place, the whole lot is held to the block with the several bolts of varying lengths which I had so carefully labelled and which are seen in the lead image. There was a brief scare when I found myself lacking the bolt that held the alternator in place, then I suddenly found it here:

Yeah, that’s a bolt in a hole that shouldn’t have a bolt in it. God only knows how it had got there. I measured it up and sure enough it was the right size to secure the alternator, so I fitted it, and that was that.
Until I then found the actual alternator retaining bolt. WTF? That means, somewhere, there’s a hole that need filling with bolt. Hmmm. I’ll come back to that.

You remember that oil cooler? Well, I took it off and it was absolutely disgusting. Caked with shit and badly corroded, changing it was essential. Easy job, too, aside from the issue of removing / sourcing / replacing the pipes that feed it with coolant. The short one was £12 from Audi, OK, fine. The long one, though, could only be bought as part of an entire assembly for a million pounds, so I removed the old one very carefully (which was a proper bastard to do) and gave it the cleaning of a lifetime.
I think I got away with it. Here’s the new cooler in place:

While I was doing that, I found this:

AHA! A home for that stray bolt. Test-fit, perfect. It was all crumbling slowly into place. So I could get on with sexier bits. Let’s change the snub mount.

Old one seen on the right. The snub mount dampens the movement of the engine by bracing the block against the front crossmember. A simple and worthwhile upgrade when tuning is in the pipeline is to fit a stiffer mount (a factory-upgrade part used by both the B5 RS4 and 2.5TDi) in place of the original. It’s tightly pressed on and I had to resort to cutting it off with a sharp blade.
Anyway, it’s fitted. I can now, finally say I have upgraded my car in some way. PROJECT AUDINARY STARTS HERE!
Woah, boy. Hold your horses. It’s not back together yet. GET BACK TO WORK.

So I did. Little by little it was all slotting back into place, until I came to the next dilemma, a tiny little oval one. The Power Steering Drive Belt.
It’s a proper tiddler of a belt, but quite an important one. The original was perishing so replacement is a no-brainer, and so cheap it would be rude not to. If only the bloody thing fitted:

Well that’s no bloody good, is it? Look how the thing just dangles hopelessly between the water pump and power steering pulleys. Bleurgh. Non-rotation and slippy-slideyness of this belt could cause steering assistance discrepancies and / or explosive overheating of engine. Bad Times Will Prevail if the above state of affairs is to be accepted.
This will not do. Looking at the belt itself, the thickness and length all check out just fine. It must be some other issue. Baffled, I ordered an OEM Audi item so there couldn’t be any debate on the matter.

A comparo between the Dayco belt and the OEM item reveals the teeth to be totally different in profile, even if the dimensions of the belt were nominally the same. The result was that the “pattern” part simply didn’t fit properly between the two-piece waterpump pulley and the PAS wheel. The OEM item went on like a glove. There was absolutely no way I could have guessed that the non-OEM part would be so useless. Total waste of time. Lesson learned, I hope.

Having replaced so many other bits of the cooling system, retaining the old radiator would have been criminal. It had leaked before and had seen more than its fair share of Radweld in its life, too, so off it went. Replacement was pretty much plug and play and a case of transferring the drain plugs and sensors across.

Fitting the new rad marked the beginning of my final night of working on the car. It was a high stakes operation: The car was booked for its MOT inspection the next day and still needed the radiator fitting, the front panel reattaching, the cooling system filled and bled, the bumper attaching and adjusting, the wheels fitting the axle stands removing. Oh, and a road test.
My grandmother (whose garage I had stolen seven months ago) was placed on standby with endless cups of tea again.

I worked tirelessly, fitting layer upon layer of ever heavier bits back where they should go, until at somewhere around ten at night I was in the terrifying position of attempting the first start-up of the car in well over a year.
This was how it went down:
[youtube]https://youtu.be/_dazz5AwEZ8[/youtube]
To say that I was overjoyed was an understatement. That it started, completely, on the button and didn’t just fuse into an unholy union of Components Which Should Never Meet, and that I had achieved it entirely off my own back was a proud moment indeed.
So I hurriedly finished putting it back together and went for a quick midnight test drive…. and broke down about three hundred yards down the road. There was coughing and kangarooing, together with a very potent aroma of overfuelling and a louder than usual turbo whistle. The world fell out of my arse… until I thought about things logically.
I found that I hadn’t properly attached a turbo hose. The engine couldn’t breathe without it. Thirty seconds with a screwdriver and it was behaving perfectly.

Next day Project Audinary flew through the MOT with nary an advisory. A week later it returned to the garage to offer defibrillation to the ailing battery of The Rover, ready for that car to haul me and my bride-to-be away to The West Country for our honeymoon (on account of that car having a working air conditioning system and the Audi having all the constituent bits of A/C but not in any servicable configuration. On the to-do list for the future. Maybe).
So, what now? Well, Project Audinary is now very definitely a runner, and over the coming weeks will display whether my worries vis-a-vis oil in coolant have finally evaporated and further tuning work can be justified. There will be a short delay now as getting married has somewhat obliterated my “FUN” fund, but I’ll seek to redress that as soon as possible.
And then, yes, the games can recommence, including (but not limited to) the installation of a turbocharger comparable in size to the Large Hadron Collider.
(All images / video copyright Chris Haining / Hooniverse 2015)