So again I'm back under the car finding the rust on the underside and to be fair it's not that bad. However it also involves days and days of cleaning the rattle can schutz that has been pointlessly sprayed over the underside of the car, and the lower arms, brake lines, subframe, diff, heat shields, springs etc etc. Why you would ask a garage to do that sort of job with all the running gear on under the car I will never know, and even more so why a garage would agree to do such a **** poor & pointless job is completely beyond me!
So It's been almost a week on and off laid under the car with thinners cloths and various brushes to remove it all so I could find and treat all of the rust.
One of the only issues I found was a corroded bracket that holds a rubber stopper for the rear silencer, it was corroded away on one of the edges and snapped
So new bracket made & welded to the car
Few underside shots are after days of cleaning
This was a before of the middle of the car, only just finished cleaning that today, and never got around to any pictures as yet.
Over the last few days I've been looking at refurbishing the rear track rods. The bushes are not in the best of condition around the edges and the rubber covers are also starting to fail as the rubber is starting to crack. Could be due to the fact some idiot sprayed them with schutz and it's affected the rubber over the years!
So for the replacement bushes I found that they are still used on the A8 D3 rear ARB coupling rods. The Lemforder part number is 2677601 or 2677701 comes in a handy twin bush pack
You can also buy cheaper febi version, but at £21 for the OEM Lemforder version it was worth the extra few quid.
For the dust covers I found this company and they sell as close as I could find the correct covers
Vehicle Rubber Parts (ej-parts.co.uk) The item numbers are PL-2807& PL-2805.
Now just need to finish cleaning both track rods, get them painted and press the bushes in.
Received the rear parts back from the powder coaters.
Coating has for the most covered my pot marked welding
With the rear subframe comes another interesting issue, well it's interesting to me anyway! So the rear M10 subframe bushes are NLA from Audi & other third party manufactures. So as the rear subframe is the same as the front just with some extra bits welded to it, so why not use the front bushes for the rear. Now I know the fronts are M12 and the rear is M10 (answers on a post card as why the hell Audi did not use a M12 nuts of the rear of the chassis rather than M10) So I've had some sleeves made up which are pressed into the bushes to reduce them down to an M10. I'm at a loss as to why this would not work, if anyone knows of a reason then please let me know.
So these are the sleeves I had made up.
One pressed into the bush
Hoping they will do the job. Also keeps the costs down
Also been pressing the bushes into the arms, a sleeve kit and a 10ton press makes quick work of the job
Bearings get pressed in as well
At the moment I'm now working on the input seal for the diff, finally got a 36mm socket for the nut and came off easy with the impact gun.
Tried to wiggle the shaft off but no luck so used a puller to remove it
Then using a couple of wood screws the old seal was pulled out. It had been leaking but not badly, but I think that was down to the fact 70% of the oil in the diff had already disappeared, so there was not much left to escape out of that seal.
Next I'll finally get to start painting the underside of the car, and I'll finish off the diff and get the struts rebuilt plus whatever else I can do while the epoxy paint dry's.