On the road to being back on the road

For the 12th Day of Christmas, my Audi gave to me… nothing. Cause she’s incapacitated in the garage. So now that the holidays are over, it was time to get to work.

Since she’s down and in need of a clutch, I compiled a list of everything that either needs to be done or I want to accomplish right now. Today I made the first dent.

During the first half of my manifold gasket swap, I ran into some problems with the valve cover stud. Broke the sucker right off.

Oh wait, I forgot to post that.

Nutshell, there are two gaskets on the top portion of the engine. Not unlike a head gasket, but this one is called a valve cover gasket. Pull some hoses and piping off, then the valve cover and swap the gaskets. Simple enough right? Eh, not always.

Disassembling and removing the gaskets was fairly easy.

Then back here there’s this second, smaller, blue gasket that looks like a half circle or moon. Looks difficult, but it was pretty easy.

Then just add sealant…

And button her back up-awww man!

Okay, now we’re caught up.

But as it turns out there was another issue that needed attention first.

I broke a torx head trying to remove the front-most black bolt which holds the tenioner to the block (the blue gasket in the back).

After replaying it in my head, I was fairly certain a chunk of said torx head dropped in the oil boxed here:

Obviously, this was quite alarming. Quite. And my magnetic tool was broken so I had to pick up another one.

Did so and the moment I placed it in the oil CLICK and lookie what I found…

Scary, huh. I got lucky. So friends, lesson learned. In addition to stuffing some paper towels in the spark plug cavities, one must put a towel down. Just in case.

So it was time to extract the manifold stud (broken nut pic above). Using a set of vice grips, it came out with ease.

I carefully screwed the new stud in, stripped off the old gasket sealant and reapplied the new and buttoned her up. Carefully this time, didn’t want to snap another stud. Although I bought two just in case. Good to go.

Opted to start on the clutch, so I put her on jacks and started looking at what needed to be done. But as it turns out on the first piece that needs to be removed there’s a stripped bolt. I’ll need some kind of nifty solution for that one so I switched back to some fun stuff.

Been wanting to do this for some time, I removed the amber inserts from the headlight housings. This is also known as ‘clearing the corners’. (Yes. the bulb still flashes yellow.)

Before:

After:

Might seem a bit odd but it actually looks far, far better. Kinda weird, who would a known that the yellow was such an eyesore? Besides, this is how they ship em in Europe anyway.

Today’s Accomplishment

Valve Cover
* get stud from stealership
* obtain magnetic tool
* try to fish broken metal out
* pull stud + install new one
* reapply sealant + gaskets + VC

Misc
* clear corners