Still no WoF, but I’m getting there, slowly! The list has a lot of things crossed off.
The speedo was working when I took Rusty for its WoF, but stopped again on the way home. So I ordered a sensor from VW, which is similar, but not identical to the Audi one. The connector and shape are different.
First test wasn’t successful, and I haven’t been back to it again since as I’ve been working on other things.
I’d been having issues with the battery going flat, and drain seemed to be minimal so I bought a new battery. I also swapped the earth cable for something more convincing.
I also bought a Matson battery monitor to keep track of it.
I sent my driver side tie rod off to HBI Engineering in Christchurch to be refurbished, and it came back after a few days as good as new. Great service, I definitely recommend them.
Once the proper steering arm was fitted, I took Rusty back to Firestone to get the wheel alignment sorted.
They also re-bled the brakes and re-aligned the exhaust. Then it was off for a chat to Chris at Final Touch Wellington to book in for a full paint correction and ceramic coat. Can’t wait to see the results! I had the opportunity to snap this little dose of 80’s goodness.
Then it was off to Kohl Rod and Custom to get the rusty hole fixed in the sill, and a battery holding strap fabricated, because there was nothing holding the battery in place in case of an accident.
I managed to sneak in a sneaky school run on the way with my daughter.
While I was waiting for parts to arrive I started thinking about the stereo again. I’d been having a problem getting the Out of Sight Audio working properly, it had a loud background hiss. After trying various troubleshooting steps I finally sent it back to the US for replacement.
The door speakers were bothering me as they didn’t quite sit straight, so I bought some small spacers to push them out and make them sit properly.
I received my little Bluetooth remote, which works really well. Just need to find a subtle place to put it.
Finally I did some work on the speech unit. The WR quattro has a talking dash system, designed to reduce the need for lots of warning lights in the dash cluster. Mine wasn’t working, so I started to investigate, and found a few issues.
Firstly these connectors were plugged together, which disables the system.
Second, someone had rather carelessly removed one of the pins from the connector. After some research I found out it was one of the two speaker pins! I repaired this and connected it to one of the original dash speakers.
After lots of cursing and some tinkering, success!
Since then, Patrizia has been a bit intermittent, varying in volume and not always working. It appears the wiring is okay but the unit might have a loose connection.
So I’m much closer to being on the road, just that speed to fix and I’m there!
Follow the full Project Rusty build here.
