The Nogaro showed up with a catless exhaust setup, not something I was thrilled with, so I began looking into options to get a different setup on the car.

Another local S4 owner has a ‘project’ car they recently acquired from an owner who had made questionable decisions to it as well. The exhaust on that car had catalytic converters, so we made a swap.

What arrived was a one piece exhaust, yep solid pipe all the way from the turbo flange to the monster tip.  Not a conducive setup for engine installs on jackstands.  I took a sawzall to the pipe and removed the OEM couplers that had been welded in place connecting the stock downpipes (with exhaust dumps!) to the frankenpipe.

1. I’ve installed the stock downpipes onto the turbos.
2. I scratch my head each time I look at the exhaust dumps welded into the stock downpipes.
3. I had to MacGyver some nuts and bolts to get the downpipes to attach to the mounting brace on the transmission.
4. I put proper turbo studs and nuts on in place of the collection of nuts and bolts that were used before to attach the downpipes to the turbochargers.

I had to marvel at the size of the muffler on this mash up of pieces.

I’ll admit to being the driver of a unfitting exhaust tip for a Audi B5 S4.  The 034 single pipe has a fairly large exhaust tip, I’ve not brought myself to pony up the money to get the dual tip setup, yet.  But what I’ve got on my Silver S4 is nothing like this behemoth.

Maybe it’s just the round muffler that exaggerates the absurdity of this exhaust tip.

Then again, maybe the tip is absurdly large.

While moving some wiring around I managed to break one of the arms of the spider hose.  On my Silver S4 I’d converted over to a silicone hose setup and had some leftover hose on hand, so I did a repair and added in a silicone arm to the spider hose.

Another thing I did was ‘undo’ the N249 delete, reinstalling the parts to operate that system.

The prior owner had also tapped the boost gauge into the FPR line, not my first choice given the importance of maintaining correct fuel pressure and my desire not to jeopardize that pressure.  So I added a port on the N249 hoses for the Boost gauge.

Thus far I’ve spent all of my time focused on attending to components accesible from the vehicle exterior, so I snapped a few photos of the interior which is in pretty decent shape.  Not all that surprising since the car only has 92k on the odometer, low for a B5 S4.

The car had a Podi steering column gauge pod in the trunk, that will become the home to the boost gauge that was poorly placed in the center vent.

The car was delivered with a new battery, so new the old one is still on the floor of the back.

Before I begin the reinstallation of the Nogaro’s engine I want to ensure the turbocharger wastegates are set to an appropriate preload level.  The first thing I noticed was that with an acceptable preload the end of the wastegate arm was going to extend a bit further than I cared for.

I took a Dremel cutoff wheel to the wastegate arms to trim both down a little.

I found that the Nogaro had shown up with the preload set to approximately 2 psi, on a K04 turbo that’s low.  I upped the preload to approximately 6 psi which is closer to what the BW K04’s come set at.

Later I undertook one of my least favorite routine maintenance activities, replacing the fuel filter.  By the looks of things this Nogaro made it to 90k miles for its first fuel filter change.