Rebuilding a Urq, TAP ECU

[Alexander van Gerbig]

    I finally have the pleasure of working on a bonafied Urq at work.  This
car has been in the shop for 4 years, yes 4 years!  Full black paint job,
full re-upholstery in black leather, almost every part I touch is new and
from the dealership, I mean everything is new down to smallest sensor in the
engine bay.  The only thing that isn't new is the wiring, man what a mess.
Do all urq's have a million ground leads in the engine bay?  I must have
counted 15 separate brown ground leads today.  Seems to me that lots of the
new parts don't bolt right up either, special radiator to condenser clips
can't be found, different wiring plug for the hall sender, hoses don't fit,
plugs in master cylinder aren't right for the reservoir, and so on.  Really
quite silly, but man what a nice looking and smelling car, that new leather
smell is real nice and the interior doesn't feel dated too much at all with
all that new leather and carpet everywhere.  Makes me want a urq, but this
guy has spent over $20k rebuilding it, so far...

    For the first time in 4 years the engine ran today.  It was quite a fun
thing to get it to fire up.  Started right up once we figured out someone
had switched every single lead on the distributor, totally out of order,
think it actually went 1,2,3,4,5 and started at cylinder number 3, odd.  My
boss had TAP modify an ECU for it and I installed a stiffer wastegate
spring.  I did dissect the TAP modified MAC-02 ECU and compared with the
stock one that was in the car.  The TAP ECU had a sticker on the chip and
definitely had the diode/resistor mod, easily visible.  Though as my boss
pointed out the chip with the TAP sticker was not the stock Audi chip,
different black color, the others were painted with some shiny black paint
and etched with writing, the TAP chip was not like that at all, when the
sticker was lifted you could see inside, like a window?!  Did TAP change the
chip and do the resistor mod?

    Anyways now I know how the urq guys feel out there when you work on
those cars.  Not to different from any 5 cylinder Audi, but surely it has
some special quirks.  The worst is definitely the electrical at this point,
not my favorite thing to do either...

TIA!

Alexander van Gerbig -- '88 80t (Gone, but never forgotten)

The Audi  80 Pages-----------------
http://surf.to/the80pages.com

North Ferrisburg, VT 05473