E-bay 4kq: Good news, ugly discovery, one minor q...

[R Mangas]

   Some (Peter :) ) may recall a thread from several months ago wherein I
was concerned that my recently scored '87 4kcsq (Ebay, 67k miles, $1550!)
had some significant problem in the tranny/center diff.  Had a howl like I'd
never heard before which didn't seem to change when sawing the wheel back
and forth.  This was because _both_ front wheel bearings were bad.  Swapped
them out this past week and I'm back in biz except for a couple minor
issues.

  One of these is a cold-start problem.  Think I've got it pretty well
licked, but in the process of diagnosis/preventive maintenance I made an
ugly discovery.  Took the rubber plenum (fuel metering head to throttle
body) off to check for cracks/verify metering plate freeplay and discoverd
that it was full of rust!  WTF?!  I had a new airfilter on hand anyway, so I
decided to swap that out and investigate further.  Well.

  That job is an absolute blast; I really enjoyed it.  Apparently the last
guy to do it didn't like it quite so much, and just sort of crammed the
filter in there, putting some holes in the filter in the process.  Problem
1.  The bottom of the airbox was just chock-full of rust as well, from the
Long-Term Rust Injector that Audi fitted at the factory.  The warmup air
shroud that sits on the ex manifold was of course rusty as hell, so rust
flaked off, got sucked into the tube and then bloop! straight into my
engine.  Lovely.  It runs good, so I'm just going to change the oil, press
on, and hope for the best.  If it takes a crap eventually this car is a
perfect candidate for a turbo swap...  The Audi gods have spoken!

  Minor q- to swap the bearings out I pulled the uprights and used a press.
It went smoothly, but now I've got a bit of vertical freeplay at the strut
bushing on the pass side.  It acts like I just didn't get the main nut at
the top tight enough, but I used an impact gun.  Any insights?

   Nice to be quattro'd again :).  Been driving the turbo Miata in the snow,
kind of a handful at times...

Robert




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