Bringing back to life an 18 year old Audi A8 D2 part 8 - various odd jobs

This post will cover various odd jobs on the car that are too small for their own posts.

Starting off with leaking cylinder head, I've had this done in part 2 of this project but as you will find out, it was badly bodged.... and paid someone good money for it.. It was causing a bad smell and smoke as the leaking oil was going straight onto the exhaust.

So, cylinder covers off:

State of head cover:

Cylinder head itself cleaned of old over silicone that was just plastered everywhere:

Silicone smeared just about everywhere, when in reality it just needs a few drops of dirko sealant in the below areas:

Cam caps were also just overcoated in silicone, whilst all they need is a paper thin coating in the hatched areas like so:

Instead, the mechanic doing the work chose to do this:

This is absolutely terrible workmanship and lack of due care. If i didn't catch it in time it could have ended with the car being written off.

New set of seals and instructions from elsawin:

After doing both banks I let the Dirko sealant cure for 2 days and after that i started the car with the bonnet up so that remainder of the oil and brake cleaner could burn off and there's been no smoke ever since. This was about 8h labour to properly clean this up.

Next up was the heating system.

First thing to take care of were the HVAC servo's, after carrying out basic settings in VCDS to determine which servo's were faulty, i had to replace them. I didn't want to buy new ones which cost £140, and i didn't want to buy second hand 20 year old ones, so instead i settled for cheap (£9-15 a piece) 10 year old ones from

VW Phaeton:

Then it was onto the heating pump/valve block combo. It's a known fault on the D2's where the valves stop working or the pump stops as its on constantly so on a 20 year old car its no wonder it can fail.

A bit of gutting to get to it:

And here it is:

It didn't look in too much of a good state:

New valve block from audi costs around £1800, that's more than the car is worth so i looked into whether a slightly newer than a used D2 part would fit from a D3 and I'm happy to report that it does after the solenoids are swapped over and some some of the pipework (its all modular) they are interchangable:

Transplant operation taking plate:

Whilst having the whole cooling/heating system apart, i decided to also flush the 2 heater cores in both directions:

And this is what came out:

With the cooling system drained, i also replaced random hoses around the engine that looked tired and replaced jubilee clips with nice stainless steel ones:

Since this hose wasn't available new from audi anymore, i found a similar one from 2.7tt or 3.0 and fitted it:

Broken off coolant return pipe was also replaced.

Next, a long lost tow eye cover in rear bumper has been replaced with NOS piece from ebay:

Rear lights have been replaced with second hand ones as the previous owner has put some nasty foil over them ruining them and making the car illegal to drive/insure:

One of the rear bulb holders was rusted so i replaced it too:

Front ABS sensor replaced with a rear one from A4 B6, they are interchanable as lon as you re-pin the plugs and cost around £27, new OEM audi cost around 280 euro.

Part 9 will cover more small to medium jobs: