1982-96 -
1997 -
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Story
I bought my car used in October of 1993 with 141,000 miles on it for $2300. It looked like a new car, and ran great, but was a little wobbly on the highway. This was cured by about $600 thrown at the front end: a couple of CV joints, a ball joint or two, and strut tower bushings.
Sometime in the early fall of 1996 I discovered the Quattro List on the internet, and what had been a harmless hobby started to become a psychotic mania. Sure, I like to work on things myself, and I like to improve or customise things a little to my liking once in a while. But all of a sudden here were a thousand odd sources of ideas for changes and donors of parts for repairs and alterations (to say nothing of a captive, if not appreciative, audience for my foolishness).
In October 1996, the day after the infamous "Kanc. Run" (which I missed), in a torrential downpour (for around here) I managed to try to "navigate" a bit of roadway that was flooded two feet deep. This was not good for my car. My engine was busted, but good. Attempts at CPR were for naught. Later inspection revealed a little gouge in the #1 cylinder that prevented the piston from reaching TDC. I wasn't really hip to the various versions of the I5 engine yet, so I picked up another 82 Coupe a tree had fallen on and transplanted its nice, strong, healthy engine with only 80k miles on it.
I have updated just about all the cosmetics to the improvements introduced in 1985. I have replaced and/or rebuilt most of the cars major systems. I have also eliminated all the interior chrome by carefully mixing and matching bits from other cars. The only silver that remains is the shift diagram on the knob, and my Audi logo key fob.
Since I don't indulge in the projects that some consider to be de rigeur, usually spending a lot of time and money to make their cars faster (sometimes a lot faster), I figured it would make sense to try to explain my guiding "philosophy" for my car projects here.
The reasons I drive Audis are several. One is that a long time ago I got my first one (a 1980 5000s), and really liked it a lot - the way it looked, the way it handled, its safety and solidity. Another is that the least reliable feature of old Audi (and VW) products is pretty much the wiring, and electrical systems in general. I am competent and unafraid when it comes to fixing, improving, and modifying these systems, so they don't pose the financial threat they might to others. The other side of this coin is that the system that is most reliable is the five cylinder Audi engine and the five speed manual transmission bolted to it. They almost never break. The things that do tend to go wrong with the car don't strand me for long, so long as I keep it above the high tide line.
(A lot of people complain about the door handles. Well, sure they break every hundred thousand or so miles, and do cost all of sixty dollars and an hour to fix. But a broken door handle doesn't stop you from getting wherever you are going on time. A cracked head does. The typical beat up, fifteen year old used Audi for sale has a broken door handle or three, a host of luxury features that don't work because the switches are dirty, but starts and runs like a new car even after sitting unused for six months!)
My cars are daily drivers. I want to drive them every day. Now that I have two "nice cars" I truly can enjoy keeping them in great shape. I have learned how much I can try to fix or rebuild in one or at most two days of work. I try to carefully make sure I have all the parts I need before starting a project so I won't have to wait for days with the car out of use - but when it is, hey, I have another cool car to use.
Driving a 19 year old car brings up some serious issues. Without proper care and planning, it can turn into a heap of troublesome junk instead of a fine automobile. So I set as my "standard" a car in the third or fourth year of its life. A car like this would still be sucking payments out of its owners wallet, while also beginning to require most normal repetitive maintenance chores. That car should still be pretty reliable and decent looking, though. With this in mind, I am justified in spending a couple of hundred dollars a month, on average, to keep my car up as well as I can. Lately I have been rebuilding entire systems, repainting the basic metal parts and replacing all the soft parts, in order to try to emulate the condition a younger car would be in.
I have learned to enjoy repairing things on my car myself, which allows the advantage of doing things no one would ever pay a mechanic to do, like replacing all the nuts and bolts with stainless steel, and fixing the little things that are exposed when doing bigger jobs. I try to always leave things a little better than they were when I do some work on my car. If an electrical problem comes up, or if I do some custom work, I add the changes to the wiring diagram in my Bentley shop manual, so I'll be able to understand what I did years from now. I use the same style of connectors and wiring concepts in my custom work as Audi did in building the car, for internal consistency. I keep a close eye on as many systems as I can, watching for known failure modes, and paying attention to service intervals, so I can prepare for repairs and effect them before they immobilise the car.
I have done some "boy racer" things to my car, I guess, but they are mostly to "fix" things that could have been done a bit better back in '82. The only thing I can't "justify" with anything I have said above, really, is the pretty much straight piped exhaust system I have wound up with. But it isn't unreasonably loud inside the car and does increase the "pep" enough to be worth it. Everything else I've done just makes it a nicer car to own and drive.
1982-96 -
1997 -
1998 -
1999 -
2000 -
Story
