[V8] update on Sash Short/....

[Roger M. Woodbury]

Funny you should mention it.  I am a novelist so it seems quite appropriate, but ‘twas on a dark and stormy night when ALL the dash lights in my tornado red with coal-mine black insides went totally dark.  I was about two hundred miles from home on unfamiliar but good secondary roads and I found I had NO idea how fast I was going.  

Anyway, not to bore you with the rest of that Victorian tale, it turned out to be the rheostat in the instrument cluster.  I was not available then from Audi as a part but I could get one in a new cluster for $900 plus exchange.  It wasn’t going to happen, so I went hunting. Those were the days before the Internet made parts hunting for the V8 relatively simple, but I found a recycler in Denver or someplace that had a V8 they were parting and they sent me the rheostat.  I think I paid $35 for it then...this would have been, oh, 1992, perhaps.  

I took the rheostat to my Audi dealer. They had a grey-haired mechanic there who had gone to the original Audi V8 introductory mechanics’ school, and he merely removed the cluster, took the old rheostat out and soldered the new one in place...at least that’s my memory.  I think the dealer charged me $40 for labor.  (It helped that the dealer was a former client of mine, but those were the days before dealers became merely money managers and actually serviced the cars they sold.).

I think your light problem may get solved if you find a cluster and make the swap yourself.  That is, a cluster or three or five, depending on how lucky you are finding one that works.

Roger