Old Coupes, cont'd

[Tom Nas]

Hi all,

Today we continued our examination of the two '81 Coupe GTs we unearthed 
Thursday. Timing belts were checked and deemed OK, fluids were replenished 
and checked. It took quite a while to get the first car (the manual) 
started as someone had hacked the wiring about pretty badly. Mucking about 
with start pilot and an alternative fuel supply got it started (after a 
couple of impressive explosions from the open carb) and it ran great. 
Incredibly, the exhaust was still in fine shape! After that, it always 
started instantly and ran like new. Clutch and gearbox to the car proved 
fine, too. Got the brakes freed off and working again and pressure-washed 
the thing. It came up looking half decent, the paint looks pretty good with 
little rust on the outside (and actually not that much underneath). I've 
actually seen post-85 Coupes that looked much, much worse than this 
early-81 example that'd been stored outside for years. Surprise- shoved the 
old-fashioned Philips radio (remember those old lug-around radios before 
the removable faceplate came into fashion?) back in the dash and it started 
playing, tuned to the major Dutch radio station- apparently its internal 
battery had held up since '96!
The second one, an automatic, proved easier to start- it ran within an hour 
of the other one. The body of the automatic looked worse than the manual, 
with a chunk of the rear wheelarch missing and numerous rust holes 
appearing everywhere. It'd also seen more body filler than the other one, 
and the engine didn't sound as healthy. Washing it wasn't as easy with the 
sunroof taped shut and a window taped in place of the one we had to smash 
to get into the car.
We decided that, while economically it makes sense to strip both for spares 
only, we'd like to restore one of the two cars. The manual car, being the 
most original and un-messed-with of the two, is the manual 4+E car (younger 
than the other by about a month). The other one, while it really deserves 
restoration, needs too much work to make it a good car and two simultaneous 
restoration projects is a little much for us. It will be broken for spares 
(though it will yield little that the other car needs) or, ideally, it will 
make someone else a nice restoration project.
Anyone want a REALLY early carb'd automatic 115 hp 1.9 CGT 5S going 
cheaply? As far as I can ascertain it's the oldest in Holland and though 
not an easy or (at the moment) economically viable restoration, it's 
certainly a piece of Audi history that deserves saving. It's very 
interesting for Dutch q-listers as it's got an original '81 registration 
instead of the ubiquitous import registration.

Pics will be up on the web within the next week, I'll post the URL to the 
list as soon as they're up. I also took a nice .mpg of an attempt to start 
the car with a resulting flame.

A fun day, nice results. It's great to mess about with old, simple cars 
where a basic knowledge of car stuff is enough to get things working again 
without having to deal with all kinds of electronic problems.
Got spark, got fuel, timing OK? Hey presto, it runs!

Tom