Thanks for all the updates, keep em coming…as long as nothing actually breaks!
Thanks for the comments.
Recently I have noticed that every now and then I could smell gas in the garage after parking the car, no sign of leaks but definitely a smell of gas, and that I could also smell it sometimes when I drove the car with the sunroof in tilt. Definitely didn’t have that issue when I purchased the car.
Tracked it down to when the car has just been filled with gas, when it was 3/4 full I didn’t notice it so much. Put the car on the lift, no signs of leaks or smell of gas under the car. Rear RH wheel off and fender liner off, again no leaks from the filler neck or smell. Opened the gas tank inspection plates in the trunk and there the smell was, no sign of leaks but it would seem the seals were allowing a slight weep hence the fumes. So I replaced the seals, there are 2, for the right and right tanks. Seals are pretty cheap both were $36 from Audi, you also need a special tool to release the locking ring, its $40 on Amazon just search T10202.
As mentioned they are easy to get to, just remove the trunk carpet and you will see the plates to remove
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/320671232.jpg
Before you release the locking ring, clean the area as it’s pretty dusty and you dont want it getting into the tank, I blew the area off with an airline. Then remove the electrical connections and the fuel lines.
The tool you need to remove the locking ring.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/410090261.jpg
My old seals were damp with fuel, new seal in place
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/877587584.jpg
Real simple fix, and it seems to have completely resolved the fuel smell issue.
Another great tip. Thanks for posting this.
Been a while since I posted last, mix of messing around with a summer car and glad to say the S8 running great. I’ve ran it for 8,500 miles since purchasing it and only recently had to top the oil up, I’m guessing its running around 3/4 of a quart every 7-8,000 miles. All I am glad to say through combustion vs leaking. The car is around 6,000 with no leaking which I’m really happy with.
A few months ago I started getting a intermittent CEL for S1 B1 O2 sensor, I tried cleaning up all the O2 sensor contacts but it made no difference. O2 sensors generally send the fear of god into S8 owners as 2 out of the 8 sensors on the car are an engine out to replace. Honestly I dreaded it, however luckily the B1 S1 is the easiest to replace, its the Bank 1 upstream sensor, as below.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/484315461.jpeg
A quick search seemed to show that the Audi sensor was $200+, its a Bosch sensor and the exact same sensor and connector is Bosch 17363 available for $83 on Amazon, Sensor was a really simple repair. Only downside is the original Audi sensor had a lead around 12 inches long, the Amazon sensor has a lead around 36 inches long, other than that its exactly the same. You could cut and splice it, I decided just to loop the lead and cable tie it up.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/226840224.jpeg
Cleared the codes, drove it for 10 miles and all seems well, no more CELs and its running great, however I will say that when I did have the CEL the car ran as good as ever with no noticeable MPG or power drop
With a few days of vacation decided to Leatherique the seats, when I purchased the car last year I had it detailed and they supposedly cleaned the leather, but it never really looked great.
Leatherique does a great job, but it a bit time consuming and messy. Unfortunately due to the time it takes I haven’t gotten an exact before and after.but here is a before of the drivers seat.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/753433705.jpg
First you massage in the oil to the seats, here is a pic of the oil applied. I just rub it in by hand. You them leave the cars 24hrs in the sun for the oil to soak into the leather, after a few hrs the oil had totally been absorbed to I applied more.
Next day you clean the oil off with the cleaner, its not that easy to see the difference after cleaning 1/2, but here goes
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/650380262.jpg
And here is the final cleaned seat
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/322351711.jpg
Overall I can see the difference, the seats, dash and steering wheel have the dull finish of clean leather, the seats still show wear but they look and feel great. Worth the time and effort to keep the S8 looking great.
Pleased to say that all of the mechanics on the car are working pretty much as intended. Next on the list is to address some of the cosmetics, mainly around the front bumper. It was always rough from when I purchased it, it looked fine from 5ft but close up and it has many stone chips and showed a poor past repair. Recently I also clipped a post on the front right when parking, all my own fault I’m embarrassed to say. Leaving the car with a damaged from lip, cracked side marker and side trim.
As you can see it’s dinged up.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/52987765.jpg
As I have mentioned before the car is my DD (now my winter DD and long trip car) and life here in MN is tough on cars in the winter, so making the car perfect cosmetically isn’t really worth it for me. With this in mind paying $$$ for a professional repaint and repair wasn’t in my plan. Some might say foolishly I decided to undertake the repair myself. HOWEVER first and foremost I will say in advance that unlike mechanical repairs which to me is easily learnt and logical, bodywork is a skill/black art and as you will see over the next few threads its clearly not a skill that I possess. I know the basics but that’s about it, happy for other with better experience and skills to weigh in on what I’m doing wrong.
First of all I stripped the bumper off, that’s a pretty simple 30 minute job. Stripping the trim off the bumper is also easy with torx screws holding the grill in place. At first I was just going to paint the bumper, and that would have been the easy part relatively speaking. However my grill was looking rough after 100k miles, so I decided to go all in and paint the grey grill black as well. Removing the chrome off the grill edge is easy and held in place by torx screws. I didn’t want to just paint over the chrome trim so decided to remove all of them and the Audi logo. They are held in by clips which after 11 years are a bit on the brittle side, I took my time and ended up only breaking a few of the tabs. I think I will probably epoxy all of these back in when I put it together to be safe. Grill stripped and ready for prep and paint.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/440807029.jpg
Next was the structural repair of the bumper, as you can see mine was broken and a previous repair before my ownership basically entailed zip tying the parts together. This repair worked but I didn’t like it, as you can see below.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/212723124.jpg
You can repair most bumpers by plastic welding breaks in the material, it’s not the most attractive repair but works using a soldering iron to melt and fuse the material together, you can also use zip ties as welding rod/filler to strengthen the repair. After welding the parts together, I then reinforced the weld with epoxy resin. You cant see this on the car so cosmetics are not that important but it has a little more structural integrity than a zip tie.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/855566501.jpg
I’m at the laborious stage of sanding out the chips, imperfections and previous repairs, it takes time but my little understanding of bodywork is that the prep is everything.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/111235273.jpg
Filled the post ding, go lightly on building up the bondo vs lathering on a ton of it that then takes you hours to sand down, I also learned very quickly to us a little less hardener than recommended as it was going off in minutes, not giving you much time to work with it.
Clearly more filling and sanding to come before I even think about the first spray of paint.
Nice thread. I have the same car with all black seats. Will try the Leatherique tomorrow
Still in the process of painting the bumper, its prepped, primed and 2 cans of base color. However having not done this before I only purchased 2 cans of color. Nowhere near enough, so more paint on order.
I did get a chance to finish the grill, at first I was only going to paint the bumper but decided to refinish the grill in satin black as well. I always felt the OE grey grill looked a bit odd on everything but the grey cars. Really pleased how it came out. Ready to go, and a pic of what it looked like before.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/873132416.jpg
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/440807029.jpg
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/796454396.jpg
Time for an update, seems to be taking a long time to fix the bumper. I didn’t order enough paint, basically you need at least 1 can of primer, I used 4 cans of basecoat and will use 2 cans of clearcoat. Paintscratch.com was great but takes around 2 week to deliver.
Sorry I didn’t take pics of the complete process, but here is where I’m at.
- Prepped as noted before, one tip I would say is just sand down the clear and the base as a key. And then use fine bondo (I think it’s called putty filler for very small chips). I sanded every chip down to the base plastic. In hindsight it’s a bad move, you can just about see this through the final painting, I’ll try and take a pic to show it once finished. I couldn’t see it through the primer, nor the base. You can only make it out now with the clear and you have to be really close up. Below is a pic of the prep where you can see I tried to sane out everything.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/575536290.jpg
- Priming was easy with 1 can. I followed the priming with more filling some imperfections with the fine putty.
- ONE BIG TIP, buy one of those $7 spray handles that attach to the can and save finger cramp, they are awesome and painting with cans will never be the same
- Base – I used 2 cans and didn’t get a really good color coverage, so purchased another 2 and had to wait another 2 weeks. One thing I would note about the base which panicked me a little was that it has absolutely no gloss, and when you spray it on irrespective of good coverage and painting in low heat and humidity it looked pretty shit to be honest. It looked patchy and almost like it had humidity blush. I cant say whether this is right or wrong but once the clear went on it looks fine ….phew. So overall the bumper took 4 cans of base color.
- Clear – unlike the base as noted above that seems to go on patchy (may be due to the metallic), the clear goes on thick, the nozzle seems to put a lot of clear per pass. Its easy to modulate but just be careful. I also noticed that the primer and base dries really quickly, the clear takes longer which helps with the leveling. It takes a bit of practice to balance too little that gives more of an orange peel look and too much that runs. Last night I put a can of clear on the bumper and it looks good. However now the clear is on you notice dust and inclusions, I don’t have many but enough to annoy. So tonight I’m going to wet sand it with 800, let it dry and then throw another can of clear to finish it off.
I’ll try and remember to take some more pics tonight, and tomorrow once it is done.
Tonight I 800 wet sanded the bumper tonight, and learned another lesson. BIG TIP lightly wet sand at every stage, especially after primer. Clearly when I primered the bumper the were tiny dust/inclusion high spots. So when I flatted the clear tonight I sanded those high spots which lead to very tiny primer marks in the paint >:(
Luckily I had just enough base paint left to touch these in, here is a pic of the base on the bumper, as you can see it looks really patchy as noted in the previous post. Imagine the shock when you see that, thank god the clearcoat puts it right.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/656116516.jpg
good work. plastic weld FTW. paining is lots of work. Its fun to follow along. Thanks for posting all this.
Spayed the clear this morning and I’m really please with the result. its a tough balance to get enough on to lay flat without orange peel and getting a run, I have a slight run in one area that I will send out with 2000 once dry and polish.
The whole thing needs cutting to give it more of a smooth shine, but here it is:
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/680397967.jpg
And here is the repair area that I think came out really well
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/418749751.jpg
And here is the can adapter I mentioned, impossible to paint a large area well without one of these
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/197399299.jpg
I think I achieved what I wanted and more, I was looking for a 5ft paint job, id say its a 1 ft ;D. I sincerely home when its on the car the color match is good. One think for sure, its a better paint job than than before I started.
Really want to get the car back together, but have to leave it a few days to a week to fully harden before cutting it back and polishing
looks fantastic from what you can see in the pictures you posted.
yup get some good thick coats on there. The gloss is good, lots of peel. But that can all be wetsanded down as long as you have enough clear thickness! looking good.
So after it fully dried, I went to look at it and to my panic and shock it had dried to this finish
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/152762503.jpg
Paintscratch in their tutorials explains to some degree covers that the clear needs cutting with rubbing compound, I decided to go one stage further and gently wetsanded it smooth with 1500
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/768553576.jpg
Following that I DA’d with 3M rubbing compound
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/234879077.jpg
Still have some more cutting and polishing to do, but it’s looking better than I had hoped to be honest
^ey there you go it looks great now after some work!
but TBH once you finally lay some paint out of an actual gun ( ireally really like Tamco paint!)
the way it lays down is beautiful. goes on wet and smooth, and then smooths out to glass when drying.
I got a mirror finish on my lexus urethane bumpers…didn;t have to touch em after paint (other than the few areas I got runs…)
but very good work so far
Thanks, I totally agree that this rattle can job is not the way to go for a great finish!!, It worked in the end but took a lot of time and effort. Wish I had the right equipment and space to do it right.
Rattle can is how I’ve done a lot of my paint work. You just have to be careful it dosent orange peel on you. It looked like it was starting to do that in the top picture but a good time and lot of work getting it sanded and polished to a near OEM finish.
Looking pretty damn good.
Bumper assembled and on the car, really please with the backed out grill and glad I removed all the chrome trim vs painting the whole thing. I feel it looks more OE and an a black car works better than the original grey finish. Below is a before and after:
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/873132416.jpg
Yes the car needs a good cleaning!
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/699319148.jpg