More Audi Updates (and the easiest coolant leak fix I've done so far on a German car)

[ItalianJobR53]

Before we get to the coolant leak, my Audi was leaking copious amounts of oil into the spark plug tubes. So much that when I was replacing plugs as regular maintenance, the plugs that I pulled out were dripping down oil. Yikes!

So I decided to replace the valve cover gasket. Pretty easy job actually on my car, theres not much stuff to remove from on top of the valve cover:

(Pics stolen from pelicanparts coz im too lazy to get pics sometimes)

All I have to do is move the coolant hard line (the black one on the left in the pic above) out of the way.
The gasket change went by pretty smoothly, got it replaced in about an hour or so.

But after that, there was a pool of coolant under the car. I immediately got goosebumps, I know how liberal the Germans are at using plastic flanges in the coolant loop and this is a 22 year old car which mean all the original plastic is going to be pretty brittle.
After talking with a friend who works at a German shop, the news was not good, there is a plastic flange at the back of the engine that likes to get brittle due to heat and crack.
Its under here:

Yeah, its a pain to get at and the intake manifold needs to come off. Great!

We packed up for the day and decided to deal with it on the next day.
While nosing around the back of the engine on the next day, we noticed this:

Thats the same coolant flange that I pointed out in the previous pic but the leak seems to be coming from the plastic retaining clip. That retaining clip is holding the coolant temp sensor in place.

We yanked out the coolant sensor and found the O-ring was in pretty poor shape.
I couldnt find a new O-ring that would fit so I just bought a new coolant sensor. New on the left and old on the right:

Its not clearly evident but the old one is really flat around the side where as its should be a circular cross section.
That seems to have fixed the leak, easiest coolant leak fix I've done so far

I also bought some LED bulbs for the car. It has these projector headlight housing so I was hoping that they will actually do improve the headlight situation:

Seems to be working well, there is definitely more illumination (LED left, halogen right)

The Audi's been a good little German car so far, everything on it has been pretty straightforward! All the quick fixes allowed me to go do some more iRacing My teammates pretty good with taking "pictures"

[pos_camaro]

@italianjobr53 You must be living right because you definitely dodged a bullet with that one!

[ItalianJobR53]

@pos_camaro yup, I should go buy a lottery ticket!

[sn4cktimes]

@italianjobr53 I had to changeout a plastic flange on my wife's VW turbo Golf. I had to remove her intake, intake manifold, the fuel rail, throttle body, the belt, jack the front, something with steering (this was a long time ago), a radiator hose (maybe 2)... then it was like two screws to changeout that actual broken thing. Took like an hour and a half on each end of less than 2 minutes of work.

[drVanTraveler]

@italianjobr53 Congrats on an easy Audi fix, there aren't many of those.
If you had inadvertently applied any force to that plastic flange I'm sure it would have assploded in spectacular fashion. It still might, keep an eye on it..