Underside, suspension, brakes, bodykit refurb of my 2001 Allroad tdi

[skyegtb]

Thought I would post this on here as it has been a little quiet of late on this forum!

As mentioned in a previous post my daily driver is a 2001 Audi allroad 2.5tdi. I've had it about 5 years now and it's been an excellent car (apart from the engine failure the I previously documented here) but it was starting to get very rough around the edges (and especially underneath), so between April and May I decided to give it a bit of an overhaul / refresh – I also did a repaint of the roof, tailgate and all external plastics – bumpers, etc. I used satin black instead of the horrible grey colour it was originally. I removed the rear subframe to allow much more concentrated grit blasting as it was heavily corroded and required some welding. I did tons of work to bring the car up to ‘near new’ condition including replacing the leaking front suspension airbags, front wheel bearings, refurbished brakes and brake lines etc. and re-furbishing / re-building everything I could. The list of work was pretty huge and I spent probably 300 hours+ getting everything completed!!! I must be mad as it is just my daily driver and didn’t really need this much attention (I suppose!)…. Anyway, below is a big selection of pictures of the entire process showing the condition at the beginning through to the completed job.

For those interested the car has a few non standard parts. Hotchkis ARB's, RS6 front calipers with custom 380mm discs, RS6 rear calipers with Phaeton 335mm discs and has been remapped to an aledged 220bhp. All 3 cats were removed (gutted) and the car pulls superbly, pretty much at the limit of the clutch. The wheels are Audi S8 replicas 19x8 with 245/40/19 tyres and 30mm spacers on each hub. My winter wheels are Genuine Audi S8 19x8.5 with 255/40/19 tyres. I really cannot fault the car, it is a pleasure to drive and gives an average of 40+mpg if driven economically. I have no plans to change this car any time soon after the amount of time and effort I have put in to it!

[skyegtb]

Continued:

[skyegtb]

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[skyegtb]

Last lot of pics:

[mrnice]

Awesome!, sub'd to read properly later 👍

[Crasher]

A local powdercoater would have made your life much easier, awesome work.....

[mrnice]

Great work, nice to see someone doing a full restoration on this shape of a6, especially an allroad, a modern design classic imo

[skyegtb]

A local powdercoater would have made your life much easier, awesome work.....

Thanks very much and ha ha, yes, it would, but the problem with living on the Isle of Skye is that there are absolutely zero facilites that offer these kinds of service, the nearest one I am aware of is over 100 miles from me, so definitely easier to just do it at home. I use 2-pack marine grade epoxy mastic on these types of jobs and have found it to be extremely resilient, definitely as good, if not better than powder coating.

[skyegtb]

Great work, nice to see someone doing a full restoration on this shape of a6, especially an allroad, a modern design classic imo

Thanks very much. I agree too, you hardly see any restorations on the C5 A6 and it is a shame really as they are excellent cars. I hope to keep this allroad going for many a year to come and hope my recent repairs will keep good for a long time.

[bagpipingandy]

Thats some serious clean up, you obviously have too much time on your hands!! a lot of time and effort, well done,

Andy