First things first, I tackled the front seats. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Upgrading seats is a no-brainer.” But trust me, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. I encountered my first hurdle when I discovered that the driver’s seat was giving me an airbag warning. I went through all the connections, all looked good. There’s a service bulletin on the seats because of a connector can fail… not that, already fixed. After tearing my hair out (what little I have), I took another look at the connectors. Driver’s side plug didn’t look like it was seating all the way. Turns out there was a small piece of broken plastic sitting in the bottom, just big enough to make the connection sporadically blip. It took some digging to remove the culprit, but problem solved.

The good news is that both front seats are now up and running smoothly, and I’m loving the added warmth courtesy of the seat heaters – perfect for those chilly mornings or cozy evenings behind the wheel. The Recaro seats are a huge upgrade from the base seats, with much better lateral support, and the passenger seat is now motorized.

However, not all is rosy just yet. The rear seat backs are a bit more high-maintenance than I anticipated. Specifically, both passenger and driver sides feature latches that require a key – which, of course, I didn’t have. No worries, though; the keyed portion of the latch is all in the plastic handle, a simple swap in from my stock seats fixed that.

Additionally, I found the latch on the rear driver’s side would not latch. I found that if I manipulated it by hand, it would fully latch, but just didn’t spring into place. I was hoping it was just in need of lubrication, but unfortunately it is broken.

The original seats from the car, however, provided a working spare. I transferred the latch mechanism from the old seat to the new one, which was actually quite straightforward once I understood the process. YouTube, once again, kept me from failing.

The passenger side rear seat back still needs some TLC, but it’ll have to wait for now – there’s a pesky wire in the way that’s making it tricky to remove.

All in all, I’m thrilled with the progress so far.

Since I haven’t listened to a CD in at least 10 years (and am not sure where my tapes are), it’s time to take a leap forward… on a budget. Three cheers for inexpensive Chinese Android head units that are tailor-made for my car model. They even pre-set the button LEDs to match Audi’s red buttons.

Time to order a back up camera…

One of the recommendations on the forums was to create an adapter harness to go between the A4 and A6 plug mapping so you don’t have to cut up the 2.7T harness. This seems good in theory, until you realize you need to cut into the harness upstream of the A6 plugs anyway.  The adapter harness really just ends up being a bunch of extra plastic bulk that won’t fit into the plenum chamber (and you need to make sure that’s closed so the ECU and/or your feet don’t get wet).

Started with the slow process of cutting individual wires on either side of the A6 plugs and immediately reconnecting them. Doing it one at a time made it easier to organize the wires by plug. By grouping the wires together I hope to better bundle them to save space.

A short 6 hours later the majority of the extra plugs are removed and the wire rearranged. I can now fit the TCU and ECU both into the plenum box. there is, however, still a long way to go to tame the rat’s nest enough that it will fit back into the plenum box.

Still a bit of straightening to do, but at least now the car can be driven without annoying the neighbors or, more importantly, me (the drone in the cabin was aweful).

The Magnaflow cat-back system was mostly plug-and-play. A bit of customization was, however, needed.

Because my cheap import down pipes wouldn’t fit around the automatic transmission they needed to be cut up. We did the best we could to get them down and out in the correct location, but they were way off. Fortunately they cheap pipes also came with some straight test pipes which I cut mercilessly.

My buddy and I then proceeded to learn how to weld on them. They are super, super ugly, but what the hell. It was a good learning experience and I’m not trying to win any car shows with the work. Besides. These are in place until I swap the automatic for a manual and get a fresh set of down pipes.

Hood closes now. Now I just need to figure out how to get the dash computer to play nice with the older transmission control unit. Progress.

Fix brakes, shorten the overly long harnesses and it’s… ready?

I could try wiring them manually based on the Bentley diagrams I have, but I think I’ll check first with the forums to see if anyone there has the answer.

Booster pump:

Vacuum vent valve plug on side of brake master. There’s still a wire connected to the fluid level sensor… why would the wire get pulled off the brake vacuum vent?

First I unbolted the drive shaft and tucked it out of the way.

Next i started working on the bolts holding the driveshafts in place for the front of the car. The bolts are tough, so I’m going to need to come back to these when I have an assistant to stand on the breaks so they don’t rotate.

Time invested – 1 hour