Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Tyranny of the Fuel Pump

I had a financial epiphany a few months ago.

Perusing the local craigslist with a martini in hand, I came across an 04 Audi S4 for sale locally.  Red. Single owner, professional, female, all maintained.  New tires.  Reasonable price.  Pull-me-over-red. I mentioned it to Mrs. Toadroller and she was game.  Excited, even. It's red. We had the cash, so...

A week later it was ours and it is what a 350 hp, 6 speed manual, all wheel drive sport sedan should be.  Wicked-pissah fast and fun.  The financial epiphany was recognizing it for what it is: a toy.  The kind that gets taken out on Sundays, is maintained well, and is just a neat thing to have.  It's not core transportation.  It's nice to have a toy car, and it's a financial luxury to be able to look on it that way.

Nature, however, doesn't like a man to own five road-going vehicles* and therefore punishes him by making sure something is wrong with at least one of them at all times.  I call it carma.

Cue the  A8, she of oil cooler and ignition control module fame, to have a sporadic stumble in her engine.  It's been there since January, letting me know that something-will-be-wrong and I'll-reveal-myself-when-the-time-is-right.  In the mean time, I've continued my long drives around northern New England for business and pleasure.  In last week's heat and heavy traffic,** she got a little more insistent that bad-news-is-coming and I turned my thoughts to what it could be.

Friday night into Saturday morning, I woke up at 4:00 AM and it was clear that my brain wanted me to work on things.  I wasn't going to get back to sleep.  Ah, well, the British Open was on, so I went downstairs to watch.  Howling winds meant no golfing coverage, so I researched fuel delivery problems on the various Audi fan clubs on the interwebs and saw a few posts referring to replacing the fuel filter every 30k miles or so.  Shit, I've had this car for 170k of its 245k and I know I've never replaced the fuel filter.  Worth a shot.  Youtube videos of the procedure? Check!  Available to buy on line, pick up in store from Autozone in the morning? Check!  Half an hour job? Check!

Four days later...

The fuel filter was simple.  Simply remove a protective cover near the rear passenger wheel, unbolt supply and egress lines, slip in new filter, re-bolt supply and egress lines with new crush washers and... nuthin.  Crankety-crank-crank-crank, no start.  This car has had its problems, but starting has always been crankety-crank, vroooOOOOOoooommmmmm.  No fuel at engine.  Diagnose the fuel line as good to the engine (yum, the taste of gasoline; won't be the last time for me).  Direct wire the fuel pump, which is located in the gas tank and accessed from the trunk to discover that it spins and gurgles, but doesn't spit.  It might be sucking some air in the tank instead of fuel given the angle I had the car jacked to, but I jacked it back up on the other side to "drain the sinuses" back to the pump and still no go-juice flowing through the fuel lines.

So a fuel pump problem?

I had the fuel pump on this car replaced by a local garage about two years ago.  Expensive Audis have expensive parts, and the whole fuel pump assembly can be had new for just over a thousand dollars.  Being frugal at the time,*** I found a used fuel pump assembly from a scrapper for something like $600 and paid the local garage labor to put it in... $1000 job.  It's a weird, unique assembly, and apparently it's tricky to do.

Guess who gets to do it again?

Fortunately, it turns out that it's a fuel pump assembly, which means parts are assembled together, which means it can be disassembled and these parts can be individually replaced.  $171 for the fuel pump motor, which is the source of all this trouble, and *gasp* $184 for the gasket kit comprised of two o-rings, a few crush washers, and one uniquely shaped gasket.  Ouch, but not $1000-for-the-assembly ouch.

Well, if you put a thousand dollars into a thousand dollar car and all you have when you're done is a thousand dollar car, you might be stupid.  Or you might have a new hobby.  If you put $400 at a time into a $1000 car, you're probably just trying to get the most out of a pretty decent set of tires with a lot of tread left.  I'm all three. I also happen to love the car.


Stay tuned as I document the R&R. Half of the parts have arrived already, and I've been spending an hour or two at a time in the garage during the evening, methodically extracting the assembly from the trunk.  No rush.  We have a toy car to get around in.


*The S4, an A4 that the eldest Toadroller kind of took over as his primary transportation, an aging Chevy Venture for hauling all the Toadrollers to church on Sundays, my Suzuki 2-wheeled fun, and of course, my thousand dollar car, the A8, who has been documented in these pages before.  And will be again.
** I495 north around Boston, 95 degrees, 1:30pm, an hour and a half to go twenty miles. I don't know how people live in urban, populous ares.  I really don't.

*** Mrs. Toadroller insists that the proper term is cheap

Friday, July 17, 2015

A Long Goodbye

It was probably summer 1998, but it was specifically in Colorado Springs, coming down Vindicator to turn left onto Rockrimmon in my aging 88 Audi 90, when the first first-generation Audi A8 I ever saw, an Emerald Pearl,* crossed my path.

Woah.

I knew of them, and had even seen pictures on the then new-fangled word-wide-web thingy, thanks to Nestcape Navigator; but in the flesh?  Stunning.  Top of the line. Expensive.  I desired one and entertained the thought that some day, who knows how far into the future, this would be the car that I would have.

It was likely summer of 1999, but it was specifically in Mahwah, NJ, outside the Macaroni Grille on Route 17 North, that I had occasion to walk around a Brilliant Black** one, peering in the driver's window and admiring everything on that gorgeous instrument panel, even the fonts on the speedometer that read up to 160 mph.

It was late December, 2002, when my relatively-recently purchased 94 Audi 100 CS was turned into by, well, an idiot.  My insurance company inexplicably found me at fault and I found myself, recently off of a decent commission check, at a dealership looking at a five year old Ming Blue*** with some 73k some odd miles on it for $18,900.

This had been a $65,000 car five years earlier.  It was my dream. Smoothly accelerating to 60 in mere moments out of a traffic light in Golden, CO, the decision was made.

She was mine.

Leather, summer and winter packages, heated seats all around, all the modern conveniences of what is, ironically, a modern pre-turn-of-the-millenium executive sedan.

We commuted. We went skiing. Months of nights were spent in airport parking garages awaiting my return. Highway cruises. Canyon runs. Winter drives over snow-pack.  Quattro, quattro, quattro.  The occasional drag race with the unsuspecting (and shocked!) Mustang or similar. Many a long drive home, late at night, after a long week of business.  Idling in rest areas for quick naps. Negative 17 fahrenheit in the deep cold of winter. Pulled over a time or three. And ever the joy of her 300 horses and 300 torque, pulling, pulling, pulling.  "Scotty, I need more power!" "She's giving you all she can, captain!"

Wash, clay-bar, rub, glaze, wax, buff, amaze.

It will probably be fall of 2015, but it will specifically be a love affair of 175,000 miles, twelve and a half (and more) years, across the country and around the northeast, through transmissions, drive-shafts, fuels pumps, tires innumerable, brake-pads and rotors, and a lot of oil, brought crushingly to an end when she dies.

The symptoms are shudders and gasps, hesitations and asthmatic idles; windshield squirters that don't, turn signals that no longer cancel when the turn is done, arm-rests gone missing, and a radio whose antennae was decapitated in the automatic car wash more than a decade past.

She's old.  She's tired. Her niece and nephew, an A4 and an S4, have taken over her home in the garage but are still chided for their brashness and lack of refinement by comparison with this regal grand dame of German engineering.

Merc, Beemer, you know she caused you to up your game. She is a D2 A8; her vanity plate says QUA8RO; she is my car.

Her time grows short.  When, how will we say goodbye?

* Paint code LZ6U M6, Emerald pearl effect, it turns out.
** Paint codeY9B A2, Brilliant Black.  I was in Mahwah, doing consulting work for Becton Dickinson on a prototype insulin injection pen, where one of the people I worked with there mentioned his father had purchased one.
*** Paint code LZ5L Q5 Ming blue pearl effect.  It's black, but really it's blue, but really it's metal-flak purple-hued blue when all gussied up.