14 Sep A Little Bit Of Everything
At the fervent request of one of our fans, we’ll walk you around the shop today and see what everybody’s up to. Sadly, no Howard The Mechanic this time.
Over in service, it’s sort of an Audi day. Truly, most of the cars we service are German in nature, but today’s a little heavier on the Ingolstadt side of things. Remember that Audi A4 that we bagged not too long ago? Well, it’s back, but for a reason you might not expect. The owner originally had some silver BBS wheels to go with his freshly dropped ride, but upon fitting them and realizing that there’d need to be a good amount of body work involved to get them to fit, it looks like he’s changed up the style and wheel altogether. He’s keeping it German and sticking with the BBS wheels, but these new ones look a little less wide and have a dramatic aesthetic change over the last set. These new wheels feature a red face with gold flake in the paint, and gold hardware to match. If you’re from Chicago, and remember that Nissan 350Z with the red/gold paint, it’s pretty much like that, except with a whole lot more flake in the paint of the wheels.
In keeping with the Audi theme, we move over to another service bay, where an A6 is receiving a new heart after its old one petered out. This is definitely not the first Audi V6 we’ve witnessed shuffling off the mortal coil, and it certainly won’t be the last, either, but it still sucks to see it happen. Nobody looks forward to a blown motor, and most people don’t ever really consider it a possibility (unless, of course, they’re running dedicated drag setups and the like), so it’s almost always a shock to the owner. Either way, we’ve set about transferring over parts to the new motor, and it should be shoehorned back into the A6 later today. Thankfully, we don’t have to drop the subframe, as Audi is nice enough to build a car with a front clip that magically comes right off. It’s almost like they knew this would be an issue…
Over in fabrication, we’re just about finished up with that E39 540i M-Sport rear section, which we’ve modeled after the E39 M5 Rear Section, with a few special tweaks for this application. Currently, things are heating up as we’re taking the acetylene torch to some steel bars to fashion the exhaust hangers.
Finally, we’ve made a little jig that we’ve since drawn eyeballs on. Aside from looking slightly like a sea monster, the purpose of the jig is relatively simple, but pretty specific as well. It’s meant to streamline the mount-building portion of our E39 M5 Rear Section construction. This way, while one person welds everything into place, a second person can heat and bend the hangers so that they’re ready to get welded on by the time the main welding has finished. This will cut a decent chunk of time off our build schedule, so we’re looking forward to using it rather frequently for this purpose. The shape of the “neck” and “tail” are meant to provide the correct angle for the specific mount that fits in that area.
Have a great weekend!
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