I fitted the new hoses, pheeeewwwwwww!!!!!
Audi #$@#! Audi! Who ever designed these hoses deserves a kick up the back side!
It was a pain of a job!
The rubbery and tin bracket continued to be the biggest pain. There is a knack to removing it and re-fitting it.
First remove hoses by pulling them out through the wheel well. There is no way the bracket will go through the bulkhead opening for the hoses.
Also the curly bit won't fit through there either. Even though my curly bit broke off it was that rusted through.
You may as well chop off the curly bit to get the bracket off. Then to fit the bracket onto new hoses you have to remove the rubber strips so its down to bare tin or whatever soft alloy its made of. Then you have to curl the bracket round the curly hose, the right way round. For my car this happened to be larger end up. In other words the large hose goes above the thinner return hose. Then fit the rubber bits back on before sliding the bracket over the thick rubbery part of the hose. Then slip through the return hose. Then put some washing up liquid on the big hose and slide it into place.
Then feed both hoses through the wheel well and into the engine bay. It is fiddly and annoying and there is barely enough space.
It may be easier to feed the hoses through separately and then fit the bracket, but then there will be less room to work with to fit the fiddly bracket.
Basically there is no easy way.
Fitting the bolts onto the rack with one hand and washers either side is a major pain with hoses fighting me to skew the bolt. I managed to do it without dropping bolts or losing washers but it was painful, fiddly and frustrating. Make sure you don't cross thread the bolts, I can see how it can happen with hoses trying to twist the bolt from true.
In the end the crows foot I linked was useless, so I had to torque the 19mm bolt by wrench.
Fit the 22mm bolt first, that one at least can be torqued correctly with a crow's foot.
Oh and make sure you bend that blo@dy bracket into shape otherwise it will bite you in the foot well if the bolts dont line up with their holes in the bulkhead.
Again a tiny 10mm wrench is your best friend here, the flexi drive just could not get a grip on that top bolt. But for the bottom bolt the flexi drive is the way to go, wrench won't turn in there.
The amount of specialist tools needed for this job is amazing/surprising/disturbing.
I had to buy another trolley jack to lift both wheels up to turn the steering wheel lock to lock 10 times. But itwas only £26 so not bad. After that, no noises and no leaking so looks like the job's a good'un
Oh and check the power steering oil level after the steering wheel cycling. I ended up putting the whole 1L bottle in, level was below min after cycling.
The stupid power steering oil spilled all down the exhaust downpipe when removing old bolts/hoses even though I tried to put something in there to catch it. I hope you have better luck with this, prep is everything to try to direct the oil away from the inside of the engine bay and into a oil tray.
After finishing the job I did my best to scrub the oil off the downpipe, the bulkhead and the subframe using a bucket of warm water and laundry powder. I did not want that carp to catch fire! Followed by lowest setting on power hose with snow foam first and then just water. Then dried everything as much as possible.
And after that I checked my gearbox oil, what a day!
Good luck I hope it goes well for anyone attempting this.
A nice warm garage would have been heaven!
\/ Torture device and puzzle in one \/
