StanceWorks: The Audi Quattro Teardown: B4 Running Gear Retrofit!

StanceWorks Video Transcript

Foreign The first step in building an exemplary Audi Quattro for the street is to tear it completely apart so a few months ago we pulled all of the suspension off of our 1982 model with plans of sending our core strut housings over to Germany so

That h r could build us a set of one-off coilovers but today we’re going to shift gears and start over first by taking a look at the Audi quattro’s younger brother the coupe quattro and S2 this later more revised car has a lot to offer including all of

Its running gear for our urquatro so let me tell you how I wound up with all of this stuff do you recognize this guy well if you’re into Audis the answer is certainly yes and unless you live under a rock the answer is still probably yes it’s Brian

Scotto Chief creative officer over at hoonigan and more important than that he’s also an absolute Audi nut he’s got a fleet of these old cars but the one that matters at the moment is his Coop Quattro now kinda like the Kardashians are famous for well not really doing

Anything Brian’s car is also famous for never being finished at least up until recently when it was unveiled with its prior design wide body and a complete overhaul it’s a 17-year long project that has helped cement Brian as one of the main figureheads of the Audi community and he loves these cars

Through and through not just the crazy ones but the simple ones as well I’d like to tell you the story about the myth of a man named Brian Scotto the only human being on the planet that owns this and also owns this but it truly loves this probably more so in fact his

Love for these cars is so infectious that I’m gonna go in and give him credit for being the reason why Ken Block was also an Audi driver however the elephant in the room is that Brian is also a parts hoarder although it’s quite surely an annoyance to everybody over at hoonigan I am

Eternally grateful for this fact because it means that Brian has a lot of Audi parts that I might want we did a little bit of horse trading for the parts that came out of my Quattro and I wound up with the running gear out of one of his

Coop Quattro parts cars so let’s dive in and talk about why on Earth I want to make the swap as you guys know the Audi Quattro is a Fickle Beast it’s front heavy thanks to the fact that the engine is entirely in front of the front wheel center line but

Despite that fact it still has a bit of handling prowess in fact it was good enough that Audi didn’t really make major revisions to the way the car drove and instead for its successor the Audi coupe quattro it received engineering changes that drastically improved serviceability on top of that parts for

The coupe quattro are actually available unlike the Ura Quattro that I have if we have all of the parts from the coupe quattro from the subframes to the control arms to the knuckles and shocks it will bolt into the urquatro but we need all of it and thankfully Brian

Scotto has all of it sitting around the hoonigan headquarters or at least he did and now it’s in my shop and we’re ready to tear it down so that we can rebuild it as good as new as I’ve said in some of our previous Audi episodes I’m more of a fabricator

Than I am a mechanic and I’ve never worked on any Audi prior to this so figuring out how everything goes together or in this case comes apart has been a bit of a process of trial and error foreign in today’s case our goal is to disassemble everything because I want

New bushings new bearings new ball joints and everything in between I want to replace everything that could be considered a service item on these subframes and for everything that’s not I want to completely refinish with fresh powder coating to make it as good as new The first audism if you will that I encountered while disassembling these parts was the fact that the bolts that hold the shock on can’t be removed unless you also remove the brake caliper now this could easily be avoided if the bolts had just been installed the other direction and maybe somebody working on

This car in the past just installed them incorrectly so let’s give Audi the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re smarter than this and this is someone else’s mistake foreign with the stretch removed from each side I turned my attention to the lower ball joints which use a bolt to hold them

Into place in an Ideal World these would probably just drop out with the bolt removed but they didn’t so I’m whipping out this tool that I haven’t used in ages it’s appropriately called a steering knuckle spreader and it’s rather ingenious in the way that it works it uses studs to fit into the

Original bolt holes and then adjusts in order to clamp the entire piece apart it’s kind of hard to explain without taking several minutes to do it so let me just show you how it actually works on the knuckle Pegs hold the tool in place and allow the wedge tip to drive the entire knuckle apart and with that the ball joint just Falls right out With the sway bar and the engine mounts removed we’re only left with the control arms themselves on a rusty car I have to imagine that removing these would be an utter nightmare because access to the inner nut isn’t what I would call Easy it’s enough room to fit a wrench but

It’s at a bit of a tough angle and there’s not quite enough room to fit a socket in place so you might be in trouble if you really needed to get a lot of purchase on one of the fasteners in my case though everything came apart

Exactly as one would hope and with both control arms removed the front subframe is completely disassembled we’re gonna replace the ball joint units at the end of the control arms and I want to refinish the control arms themselves so they too need to come apart While replacing the ball joints is a very simple Affair replacing the bushings is anything but my initial optimism had me hoping that a bit of heat and a persuasive Hammer would do the trick that I could simply tap these things out and call this project done but I tried a few different

Methods and got absolutely nowhere as anticipated the internet suggests I should drill out the Rubber and then Sawzall the metal sleeve but I’ve played that game on other control arms and instead of doing that eight times over I’d rather just spend 100 bucks or so and buy the specialty tool and we’ll

Save this one for the next episode Foreign disassembly which was the front hubs the brake dust shields on all four corners of the coupe quattro suspension were completely mangled so those are going directly in the trash I also need new wheel speed sensors which surprisingly aren’t bolted into place they’re just a snug press fit

All that’s left are the hubs and bearings and on the note of hubs I’ve got to make a decision the car is currently a 4×108 lug pattern which is well rather unique I’m considering re-drilling these hubs to 4×100 to give myself more wheel options or I could five lug swap to S2

Components that’ll decide all of that later thankfully the hubs pressed right out of all four corners there was almost no effort involved the bearings on the other hand didn’t want to play ball even with the persuasion of heat I couldn’t get the bearings to press out

Of the knuckles my 5-ton Arbor press can output 10 000 pounds of force with relative ease and if You Yank on it it’ll far surpass that and even still this stuff didn’t want to budge if you look closely you can even see the inch thick piece of Steel underneath it flexing

So we’ll save those control arm bushings and the wheel bearings for the next episode and we’ll go on and turn our attention to the rear of the coupe quattro and first we need to remove the axles from the differential there was a lot of CB grease built up in

The heads of what I assumed were Allen bolts but once I took a closer look I realized I needed to find a specialty tool I’m told this is called a triple star bit and thankfully my buddy Byron over at liked bow happened to have one in his toolbox that was just the right size intuition tells me that it’s probably a terrible idea to use an impact with one of these bits but my desire to get this

Project done went out and thankfully that didn’t backfire as always if you’re enjoying the episode and want to see more progress on the Audi as it nearest completion leave a like or better yet subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already actions like those go a long way towards

Supporting the channel and helping it grow and best of all it’s free with both axles unbolted it’s time to remove the differential from the subframe itself it’s held in by three bolts one at the rear and two in the front one cool thing to note is the fact that

The front diff mounts are different side to side one is mounted to the top of the subframe and the other is mounted underneath this is clearly done with the torque applied from the differential in mind and it must work pretty well given how much power these cars are capable of

Putting down to the ground Perhaps it’s to be expected of Audis but unlike any BMW I’ve ever worked on with the axle bolt removed the axle slid right out of the Hub without any fight whatsoever just like the front the biggest fight in disassembling the rear was simply removing the rusty calipers from the

Rusty brake rotors once again a screwdriver did the trick but it’s pretty clear at minimum these calipers will need a serious rebuild while someone out there might say that it’s worth turning these rotors down they are headed straight for the trash when the time comes in their place we’ll

Install some nice vented and slotted rotors once again I’ve flipped the subframe over so that we can remove the control arms but unlike the front the rear has toe links it’s really clear that if I wanted to it’d be incredibly easy to add four-wheel steering to this car and in

Fact Audi actually built a four-wheel steering prototype of the original Quattro but I think that’s better left as a prototype the ball joints for the toe links were by far the worst part of disassembly despite my best efforts I simply could not get them to keep from spinning inside of the steering knuckle

Eventually it was penetrating oil and heat that did the trick foreign The other side was a bit more Cooperative until it came to actually removing the ball joint from the knuckle I’d use my favorite ball joint separator and it came right out thankfully that brings us to the last bit of disassembly first is the diff mounts and then once

Again the control arms on each side foreign We still have to worry about all of the bushings and the bearings that are still pressed into the hubs but otherwise everything is disassembled and laid out on the shop floor as said when we started I had no idea how any of this stuff came apart and I promise that I

Won’t remember how any of it goes together here in a few months so I bagged and labeled every single bolt that came out of these parts now after all of that let me finally further explain why we’re doing this suspension swap here we have our old strut and the new

One side by side and if we look at the old one the one closer to us you’ll see that it’s got this big cast steel structure on the end of it it’s an integrated knuckle and strut all in one unit now there’s nothing inherently wrong with this design although it is a bit

Heavy by modern standards but the problem in our case is that because it’s all one unit if we want to turn this into a coilover we’re gonna have to send it out to be modified no one produces an aftermarket coilover with this gigantic cast piece of Steel attached to it on

The other hand if we look at our new strut and hub assembly you’ll notice that they are multiple pieces the knuckle is bolted to the McPherson strut assembly which means we don’t have to send the entire assembly out to be modified because this strut assembly

Just has metal tabs that mount it to the knuckle h r is able to produce these along with a steering arm and ultimately that means that we can turn to our friends at h r and instead of ordering custom parts for an old Audi Quattro we can simply order an off-the-shelf kit

For an S2 if we look at the original control arms off of our Audi Quattro you’ll see that they are constructed of stamped Steel the control arms off of our coupe quattro on the other hand are forged steel units and they are considerably stronger while I don’t imagine that

We’re likely to break either version it’s nice to have the peace of mind and the added availability of aftermarket bushings for the later model stuff Brian was nice enough to include a differential with these parts which is a part that I didn’t even realize that I needed some of you may remember that

When I bought our aan donor engine it also came with a differential that you see on the left but it turns out a few knowledgeable folks have told me this one won’t fit in our car although it does look extremely similar to the one that we’re going to swap in its place

On the upside the new one does still have a vacuum Locker which sounds like a whole lot of fun once this thing finally hits the dirt last but not least there’s a few other parts most of which will get replaced but I’d like to do a little bit of

Research and find out if there are some good big brake options for our current suspension setup the coupe quattro brakes do look a lot bigger than the original Quattro brakes but if there’s a better option out there I might just go for it now another detail that I think is

Pretty sweet now that I’ve got all this stuff torn apart is the fact that the front subframe and the rear subframe are literally the same part they use the engine mounts as diff mounts the control arm mounts are the same literally it’s an identical piece same exact stamping with a couple of

Small add-ons welded onto it like a diff mount for the back of it look at this if we look in here where the original engine mount was you can see all of the kind of the stamping shapes and all of this kind of stuff

You get an idea of how all of the metal is shaped all the way through the entire part with the understanding that this is the front subframe we move to the rear and it’s literally the same part 100 identical the only changes that I can see that they’ve made is this diff

Mount welded to the top side here we’ve got it sitting upside down and the rear has toe link mounts versus sway bar mounts it’s literally the only difference so at this point there’s only a few things left before I get all this stuff sent out and powder coated I’ve got to

Get all of the bushings pressed out of the subframes bushings pressed out of the control arms and the hubs pressed out of the knuckles so in terms of the knuckles those will come out with a hydraulic press I’m not too worried about it we could cut our way through

All of these bushings on the control arms but there is a special tool for it and instead of fighting with it for an entire afternoon I’d rather just spend you know 100 bucks and have a tool so that when I need to do this again someday I’m prepared for it and then on

The subframes I haven’t even tried dealing with it yet I’m going to worry about it later this afternoon or tomorrow but otherwise everything should be ready for pickup we’re gonna get it all powder coated we’re gonna put all new bushings in new motor mounts All

That Jazz I’m gonna try to find a LSD unit for the differential if that’s even a thing I got to do some research figure out brakes all in all it’s coming together once it all comes back from Powder Coating I want to get it back on

The car ASAP along with our h r coilovers so that I can measure for wheels and we can get some custom wheels ordered that’s high on the list and we can put the car back on the ground down and roll it around and hopefully by that

Point we’ll be looking at all of our engine parts coming back we’ll have an engine to put together and we’ll get started on all of the fabrication for our full Turbo System everything like that there’s a lot of stuff to do I am so excited about this project I hope you

Guys are enjoying it I know it’s a departure from the Ferrari but honestly I can’t even put into words how stoked I am to be working on it it’s just a blast I’m having so much fun it’s something totally new and different for me and I’m

So eager to hear this engine so that’s what I’m working towards I’m done rambling I will cut this episode off here thank you guys as always for the support I’ll catch you guys later this week if everything goes according to plan I’ll see you then