[V6-12v] oil consumption and egr system and replacing instrument bulbs

[George Tur]

I didn't think that repairing the egr, thank you Nathan White for the great 
write up, would have any impact on the A6's oil consumption, but it appears 
to have. I'm puzzled about that.

My wife drives a 1995 A6 that has always consumed around 1 qt per 1000 miles, 
we bought the car used in 1998 with a little over 50k miles on it. I've 
brought it back to the dealer a number of times and they've always said that 
the oil consumption was within the manufacturer's range of normal usage. A 
couple of months ago I cleaned out the egr system and now I've noticed that I 
haven't had to top off the oil system like I normally do. My wife puts a lot 
of mileage on that A6, somewhere between 2 to 3k miles per month so I've had 
a lot of practise checking, and topping off, the oil level in her car. I 
wouldn't think that there would be such a correlation between oil usage and 
the egr, but to my casual observation there appears to be. Anyone ever run 
into something like this?

On another subject. Some of the instrument bulbs and the light for the mileage 
and temperature gauge have gone out on the A6. Does anyone have the procedure 
for getting at those bulbs? I took a quick look at the instrument panel and I 
didn't see any obvious fastners. Is it like the center console fascia where 
you have to pry a panel up?

Hope you all had a happy holiday and that your Audis ran merrily.

George Tur