RangeR BoB's Audi A4 gauge pod Page!


The pod from the driver's seat

Installation:

I put in two gauges into my car over the weekend: Oil Pressure and Boost. They are both Autometers, with white letters on black faces with black bezels.

I used the Autometer pod on my A-pillar, which leaves something to be desired. The fit of the pod to the pillar is not perfect, but once installed, it looks OK, If I were to do it again, I would remove the cloth from the A-pillar, and section off the pods and make them integrated into the A-pillar plastic and then recover it. However if I was going to spend that much effort, I'd build a new dash cluster the way I wanted it.

The pod mounts to the A-pillar with 4 snap in posts. Double stick tape is not an option, so suck it up and drill the holes. I also drilled a 1/2" hole for the wiring.

The gauges themselves went in pretty simply. They are a friction fit in the pod openings.

Boost Gauge:

I teed the vac/pressure line from the front of the intake manifold (the hose which goes to the wastegate) and ran rubber 3/16" line back across the top of the head next to the injectors under the plastic head cover.

Here is the T fitting tapping into the boost line going to the wastegate.

I routed the hose over the engine beside the cam cover. At the firewall, there is a spare grommet nipple that I snipped and used to penetrate the forward firewall.

At this point I started to use the 1/8" hard nylon tubing for the gauge. The 6'of nylon hard line that Autometer provided wasn't enough to reach to the gauge by itself. Between the firewalls I routed the tubing behind the master cylinder and into the ECU box thru a grommet already there.

Here you can see where the hose goes into the ECU box.

From the ECU box into the interior was a frustrating trip using a claw type pickup tool and a lot of wiggling & cursing..

I picked up the tubing in the interior with the claw thru the fuse panel cover and routed it up thru the hole in the A-pillar and into the boost gauge.

A little dab of teflon permatex sealant on the threads of the brass fittings, and I snugged up the adapter to the gauge. I slipped the nut over the line, then the brass crush ferrule. I inserted the tubing & ferrule into the adapter on the gauge and snugged it down with the appropriate wrench.

Oil pressure: The sender goes into the oil cooler adapter on the side of the engine. The Autometer sender is 1/8" NPT, which sort of screws into 10x1 metric hole on the cooler adapter, but not really. I was able to locate an 10mmx1 to 1/8" NPT adapter, so I used it. This went into a T-fitting, which I detail on its own Installation Page.

I ran the wire from the sender thru much the same route as the tubing earlier.

Wiring the pod:

Before I installed the pod, I wired up a positive and a negative power supply wire. Those provide power to the oil pressure gauge and the two lights. The ground is clamped to a screw that holds down the fuse panel, and the hot I got from an unused key-switched fuse in the fuse panel via a spade connector. The lights are therefore on when the key is on. I have a 99.5 and the instrument lights are on all the time anyway, so I didn't figure this would be a problem running the lights to the gauges whenever the key was on.

Inside the fuse panel.
You can see the clear 1/8" nylon tubing for the direct reading boost gauge.
The green wire is for the oil pressure sender
The red and black are power and ground.
Note that Avants may not have this fuse free, I believe.

How do they work?

The engine idles with 25 psi oil and 15 inches vacuum. At cruising speed, I am getting 10 inches vacuum and 75 psi oil. At full throttle, its fun to watch the K03 run out of steam and boost drop from 15psi at low revs to 5 at redline.

I haven't had any problems with the needle bouncing from the frequency valve for the turbo. I didn't use an accumulator or the like. I did not notice any boost spikes over 1 bar. Perhaps with 100+ air temperatures I won't...

Anyone who wants to do it I suggest having the parts and tools on hand when you start, or else plan on taking the whole weekend to do it.