The Project Pad

Lucky wrote:

Marc wrote:we (EFI) will have some steel 01e rs2 rep trans mounts coming soon. just got a cnc plasma table and I dig it

I will 100 percent take a set. If you need some measurements taken let me know.
I dont know how much longer these have left before they completely fail.

I have jigs all made up. it will be soon, within 2 weeks time.

Time for some summer updates. First up I recieved the steel transmission arms from Marc @ efi and they are working beautifully.
The AKM subframe and control arms arrived, they are fantastic the craftmanship is evident here! I have the front all installed and functional minus the swaybar. I cant run the stock swaybar with the akm setup, I'm still looking for a substitute. I had some initial install issues where i thought I couldn't use one set of the control arms. After talking with Albert at akm he sent me some documents that cleared everything up.

It seems when 034 installed the front ball joints they used something out of the audi parts bin that wasn't usually on an 80. I dont know what they were from but they had the wheel around 3/4 inch further forward than the akm control arms which already increase castor by over a degree. To go along with the strange ball joints the subframe I pulled out was hacked together, not quite what i expected from a shop like that. The best I can figure is that they refused the subframe the previous owner installed when the car had a 3.6 v8. The patches are bubblegum welded in and the exhaust clearance wasn't even completed. There was even a bolt used as filler material haha.




Either way im glad that junk is out of the car and the akm frame is in. It was a painless install, the frame even has adjustments for moving it forward/backwards, side to side etc. Everything feels much more solid now the steering feel is much lighter without the overdone castor.




I have one last issue that remains. In order to install the rear control arms I either need to swap out the rear suspension because the akm setup is for a different upright(this would suck as the rears are a custom made v3 setup) or fabricate my own ball joint mount. Currently the rear ball joint looks like this with a ball joint that bolts to the upright.




My plan is to make a plate that bolts in like the ball joint and a receiver like this ball joint extender to accept the akm ball joint pin. I think that would be sufficient to hook up the control arm. I just need to make sure it is machined from materials that are strong enough.



Finally no post is complete without some track pictures. With the new setup I've dropped my lap times by over a second on my first time attack of the season.






If you look closely in the last picture you can see the body lean and the tires cut away from the turn as I slide through turn 8 in the rain.

Those welds are god-fucking-awful, downright shameful.

Nice to see the new gear is already paying dividends, will be paying attention to what you figure out regarding the rear BJs and the front sway bar since I have an RS2 front bar and also have KW V3. Whiteline FSB from the UK or Australia, maybe?

Fbatwork on this site has an akm setup and is running swaybars I'm just waiting to see what he got them off of. I think he is away for work atm.

Heres a picture of the suspension when it was first installed years ago. I think the ak stuff bolts in to most b3/b4 cars maybe mine is the odd one out?

Could be... the top ones look the same as my KWs, bottom ones not at all.

Been a while since my last update. So I've always had trouble bleeding the coolant system in the car, fighting airlocks etc. It would take multiple heat cycles, lifting the front of the car and burping the coolant tank. I just lived with it and put it on the engine being from a different car, maybe a different height in the bay so the air traps easily. The other day in was browsing the project section and was reading through George's ABZ post. I noticed that his hoses were setup different than mine. I started digging through the net looking at a8/abz rad setups and realized whoever built the setup in my car(034) put the hoses on backwards. The thermostat was routed to the top of the rad and the two lines from the top of the engine went to the bottom of the rad. Basically the worst routing possible for trapping air. I was able to flip the double hose up top cut the 90 off and attach a hose from my old urs4 with the coolant reservoir return line. The other side was able to be flipped and routed down pretty easily. Just in case I added a quick bleed also from the urs4 to the heater return line.

On first startup for the first time ever was able to add coolant and not bleed or burp the system. One heat cycle and a top up and the level is perfect. It's hard to believe the difference a proper setup can make. On top of that I now have enough room to add a proper shroud and cooling fan which will hopefully be ordered soon.



The newest project I was working on today was modifying the passenger seat from my urs4 to fit in the 80. I had to cut and shorten the rear crossbar to fit the rails. The seatbelt mount was able to be shortened about a cm and it still has full threads and the stock bolt so no strength lost there. The front pads were a mixture of both ps and ds. One bolt hole lines up and the other I will add. Just need to run the power and ground.

All in all it should fit great, now both seats will match haha. When I did the driver side i used a b4 power seat base and some spacers with the urs4 seat. 2 different approaches for the same result, although I had to gut the power memory setup and rewire the ds seat to fit the b4 base.

Both seats installed. Have to open the door to operate the passenger seat controls but it's a minor inconvenience.

Shawn, which VEMS version are you running? I've got an ABH with ABZ parts, so I'd be curious to see how your file compares to mine.

cuatrokoop wrote:Shawn, which VEMS version are you running? I've got an ABH with ABZ parts, so I'd be curious to see how your file compares to mine.

I'm currently running VEMS firmware 1.5.57
Attached is my last saved configuration from before storage, im pretty sure its what is installed at the moment but i would have to hook up to the ecu to be sure.

There is most definetly room for improvement in the tune. While it has been on the dyno, I have never actually dyno tuned it so the ignition map is pretty much the base map i recieved with the ecu. Just logged and made changes to the fueling ect. as I drove it on the street and track.

Keep in mind my setup was originally an 034 iic and harness that had an adaptor harness made so some outputs may not be the same as yours.

If you have any question just ask,

Cheers

New seats look great! I bet they're much more comfy and supportive. Always liked them.

And nice work on the coolant hose routing. Interesting brain fart by the builder, just goes to show even the experts are mere mortals.

PRY4SNO wrote:New seats look great! I bet they're much more comfy and supportive. Always liked them.

And nice work on the coolant hose routing. Interesting brain fart by the builder, just goes to show even the experts are mere mortals.

I've been running the drivers seat for a while and it's great, hard to believe it did 420,000km in the s4 before it came to this car.

As for the coolant system who knows lol. It's all good now though!

Lucky wrote:I'm currently running VEMS firmware 1.5.57
Attached is my last saved configuration from before storage, im pretty sure its what is installed at the moment but i would have to hook up to the ecu to be sure.

There is most definitely room for improvement in the tune. While it has been on the dyno, I have never actually dyno tuned it so the ignition map is pretty much the base map i received with the ecu. Just logged and made changes to the fueling ect. as I drove it on the street and track.

Keep in mind my setup was originally an 034 iic and harness that had an adapter harness made so some outputs may not be the same as yours.

If you have any question just ask,

Cheers

Thanks Shawn. If I remember correctly, Ben used an ABZ harness for the VEMS build. I'm not sure the firmware version, it's been a while since I've plugged into it to be honest. The car has never seen a dyno either, I pulled some information from Nesbitt's config file, and that helped cold start quite a bit, but in all it could be better. At some point it needs to be put on the rollers and actually tuned.

With the new space created from re-routing the coolant lines I was able to fit a shroud behind my rad for a proper setup. I contacted a local fabricator/bike builder to bend up some aluminum. Moved the fan to the upper drivers side area to buy myself a little space from the crank pulley. The mishimoto fan has a knub dead center that sits out further than the rest of the motor. I did have to fab up a new mount for the bottom of the rad since I swung it forward by a little over an inch.
Overall it turned out great. I logged a 2 hour drive today with vems and coolant temps never rose above 93°c/200°F with a mix of city and highway driving.






The last picture shows clearance to the crank pulley only 1/4" or less.

It's been a pretty busy summer so far with a few failures and upgrades along the way. When I installed the 01e I modified the 02 a4's linkage to work. The only drawback was that there was no stop between 1st and reverse. No big deal, it's never been an issue selecting 1st gear at a stop light and the shift to 2nd was always natural feeling.



The issue came at the track in a left handed hairpin while down shifting from 3rd to 2nd.... I messed up... bad. Between the braking, flex in the chassis and no stop to hit and pull the shifter to 2nd I had a really bad shift. The collar for 1 and 2 locked up, I finished out the lap and went to the pits to check it out. Yup, definitely locked up, it came out of no where. I've never had an issue grabbing second, till the time I did haha.
I jumped on the phone and called a guy I sold some parts to recently. He had an 01e code edu from a b4 s4 for sale and i was able make a deal and pick it up that night for a really good price.





Two days later I swapped over my center diff, axle cups, speed sensor, and cleaned all the bolt holes on the case with a tap for my next upgrade, then bolted it in.

So after locking up the old transmission I decide that cant happen again and ordered a CAE cable shift conversion.



This thing is awesome, there is a very satisfying clunk when you engage a gear and the setup is very easy to adjust. The price is alot to swallow but I'll only have to buy it once. I was able to install it with the trans in the car(hence tapping all the bolt holes ahead of time) for the interior I had to trim in front of the shifter and dremel out a small portion on the drivers side for a linkage rod. Instead of removing alot of material on front of it I lifted the center tray carpet/material and drilled holes where the 10mm nuts hold it in. Once installed i put the carpet in place over the holes, you would never know they are there. Overall it was an easy install with the drivers side trans mount removed.





There is more noise in the cabin from the trans tunnel with the aluminum cable case vs the old linkage but it's not too bad. Just takes a little getting use to. Same goes for the shifter height, I went to wave to a friend who was passing by and backhanded the shifter haha. The 2 -3 shift is great, the cae has a centering spring and that combined with the transmission centering spring makes for a very clean upshift. I sat in the garage slapping the shifter from 2-3 as fast as I could to see how hard it would be to potentially money shift into first gear. I couldn't make it happen, so let's hope that translates to road manners too. Next up for mods will most likely be brakes!

So the next mod wasn't brakes after all. I decided to finish up the rest of the subframe and suspension bits. I ordered a rear tubular subframe from Verkline as well as some mounting plates for the control arms and adjustable strut mounts. I'll have these installed for the upcoming season and then get a proper track alignment and corner balance done.

I can't say enough good things about Albert from Verkline. He was always quick in responding to my questions and very thorough, ensuring I was ordering the right parts for my unique suspension setup.

God this thing is great.

pilihp2 wrote:God this thing is great.

Thanks, it's a been an adventure for sure!

Looking awesome! Great work.

Well done on those seats! I often thought about putting a set in my old A4, but never did. And those subframes and coilovers are quite nice to look at. Keep up the good work.

How satisfied are you with the CAE Shifter?
I've been thinking about installing one for a long time.

[sTeeWie] wrote:How satisfied are you with the CAE Shifter?
I've been thinking about installing one for a long time.

Very satisfied. The shifts are short, gears are close together and there is a very satisfying clunk on each shift. Going from a linkage to cables make a huge difference to the shift feeling. On the track it's amazing, doesn't matter what you have the car doing(corner, straight etc.)you always hit your shift.
In the b3 chassis I find the cables have to be set to their shortest settings. I had to remove one washer to get the cable fitment right. If I did it again I would just drill new holes in the shift box and move the whole assembly back about 10mm. I imagine the fit is perfect for the b4 chassis.
To me the only downside is the cost, it is a pricey setup. Especially with shipping, duties etc.