Hi all,

My first drive in this car really impressed me. I knew it had potential. The German fit and finish of the interior.. the smooth ride.. the body styling was sexy.

And that was about a year and a half ago, the car was already like 10 years old!

I drove an '04 Focus for about a year before this car, and even though it's 7 years older the ride in the A4 is better.

It's a 97 A4 tqm. I think it had about 117k when I got it, it's about 130k now. Black with black/grey leather(ette) interior. It was repainted black before I got it, decent paint job, but it has since gotten some scratches and dings I need to fix.

I've been driving it for a while now, and it's time to catch up on the maintenance, and then move on to upgrades, and more power.

So i'm doing the timing belt, water pump, cam and crank seals etc this weekend. While i'm in there i'm putting in a new coolant temp sensor, and a Stern snub mount..

i'm also going to install a (new to me) suspension i bought... MTM lowering springs and s4 shocks.. supposedly lowish miles on them.

still on the maintenance list: drivers window regulator as soon as i get the part... headlight stalk to fix my non-illuminating inst. cluster... control arms (fronts thunk, rears squeek) cv boots or new axles... fix the odometer since the mechanic who worked on my a/c messed it up.

On my wishlist: I really want 034 engine and tranny mounts to tighten up the car, that or RS4 mounts.. i need some 18s... then i'll get a chip, exhaust, jhm short shifter... etc

Well that's my intro. I'm going to try to do the timing belt myself this weekend. I used to be mechanically inclined but it's been like 6 years since i've really done something as involved as this. My brother is a honda racer and can drop and replace an engine (honda anyway) in like 4 hours, i'm going to try to get him to hang out for a few hours just in case

So i'll be around, asking questions, trolling the classifieds for parts and just being a general noob!! Can't wait to get the suspension on!

(i'm reposting this in here since i doubt most people ever read the new member introduction forum)

 

Good luck!

 

nice man, where are u getting the timing belt and water pump, im trying to find them for cheap...

 

http://www.blauparts.com $270 with free shipping. Comes with everything you need including water pump. I personally did it all myself and no special tools were needed. Some said the kit looked cheap when i posted about it, but it isnt by far. It is a very well put together kit with high quality parts. Dont expect to just use the instructions that come with the kit though, they suck.

 

blauparts has a good kit, i think ecs had one too, its a little more expensive but comes with more stuff. i think thats the one im going to be getting.

 

I actually bought part of the kit from a guy on the fourtitude forums, he had the belt, water pump (full pump, not just the half piece, Meyle brand), tensioner and tensioner roller for sale for $165 shipped.

i looked at a few of the other full kits at purems, ecs, blauparts etc, read thru a few timing belt diy's and threads and ordered everything else i wanted to finish the kit out from mike @ purems, who is a great guy btw, humored my noob questions with patience even though i kept him on the phone till 30 mins past closing.

$172 plus $12 shipping from purems:
3 Cam Seal $14.85 (2 cam, 1 crank actually)
1 Thermostat $16.95
1 Timing Belt Relay Roller $25.95
1 A/C Belt $9.95
1 P/S & Water Pump Belt $7.95
1 Serpentine Belt $12.95
2 Coolant $19.78
extras:
1 Stern Engine Snub Mount $29.95 (baby step toward a better suspension lol!)
2 CV Boot Kit $33.90

so by my math i paid around $285 for the timing belt parts, and i feel like i got the best parts available

can anyone think of anything else that should be changed while i'm doing the timing belt?

 

Thats alot of stuff. Good luck with it all man and keep us posted.

 

Guys - price it out with www.germanautoparts.com - I've dealt with them several times and they're top-notch. They're only 2 hours from me so sometimes it's cheaper for me because I can save on shipping, but you may find some of their parts to be less expensive. FYI, ECS and PureMS are awesome to deal with as well. And whatever you do, when you order the timing kit, don't waste the money on the cam locking tool - we found it to be 100% unnecessary. The cams won't budge unless you hit them with a hammer. Save the $150 for something else.

 

haha dang, i wish i knew that before i did my timing belt. I would have taken the cam sprocket off and did the seal. I didnt do any of the seals when i did my belt. I didnt want to mess up the timing. Also they looked fine, almost brand new. But either way i would have done the cam seal and the intermediate shaft seal if i knew the cam wouldnt have moved

 

I did the timing belt last night. It wasn't hard, just took a lot of time and patience to make sure everything was done in order.

I ended up not using the whole water pump. That was going to be a pain to remove the whole thing, so i just did the half pump. so much for planning to install the whole pump lol. the half i didn't use is just machined metal, nothing to really break or anything. I also didn't do the cam seals. i just wanted to be done with it, since i pulled an all nighter last night just to get it done. I had to take the new water pump apart, and of course the gasket was stuck to the side of the pump i wasn't using! i scraped it off best i could with a razor and superglued it onto the pump half i installed. hope that works ok!

i also installed the Stern poly snub mount while i was down there. i thought the car was idling rougher than normal when i started it up, but then i remembered the snub mount. i think it's conveying a bit more of the engine noise into the car. the car did feel *slightly* tightened up when i drove around, but i only took it around the block. my control arms are so shot, and my suspension is so worn out that i don't think i'll really have a baseline to compare to until i get them upgraded.

In the end, it turned out that the timing belt was actually changed sometime before i got the car. i had been driving it with no idea whether it had ever been changed or not since the car had changed hands a few times before i got it. it had the updated tensioner and roller, and the tbelt looked like it was in good shape. they must not have bothered with the accessory belts because they looked like crap which is what had me worried that the tbelt had never been replaced...

I took $200 i was going to pay a friend to do the work for me, and bought a decent starter set of tools, a jack, jackstands, and a creeper and some halogen lights to do the work... feels good to have invested the money into tools that i can use in the future, instead of just paying someone else to do the work for me. (i'm starting from scratch, 0 tools besides a few screwdrivers and pliers)

anyhow, just wanted to report how the tbelt change went.. not bad for a guy that has never done car work this involved, and thank God for the audiworld tech article database and the tech articles on this site and the others!