VOoDOoGTX

well im trying to have a cool mind but i was wondering why my car was spitting coolant out at me and loosing power. Thats my main concern i looked around under the hood and couldent find and breaks in the coolant line. Im thinking maybe of replacing the oil cooler myself. Would this make any of these problems go away?

Fuzzbeaner

I'm in Eastern MA right now for college!

austinado16

You've gotten yourself into a ****ty position.

You bought an "unknown" used car, had a minor problem and took it to a muffler chain and you got raped.

That got compounded with advice from all sorts of sources and then you finally found an Audi shop.

This is not a good position to be in, because you're out a butt-load of money and being led around puppy on a string.

So, about your questions:
1) Oil in coolant. 2 possible sources. A)an oil cooler (locate right there where the oil filter screws on, with 2 hoses going to it. It's actually a "heat exchanger" so it transfers heat from the coolant to the oil to make the oil warm up faster, and then it transfers heat from the oil back to the coolant once the oil gets nice-n-hot. They commonly break inside and then you get the oil at 60psi being pumped into the 15psi cooling system. Yes, you can replace that yourself with minimal tools and maybe 30min of time. B) the other cause of oil in coolant is a blown headgasket. There's no way to tell which headgasket on a V engine is blown, so you have to do them both. Plenty of knowledge and special tools required, and probably 8hrs to complete....so no, you won't be doing that by yourself.

2) The misfire and loss of power which appears to be cured by shutting the car off and restarting. I'm not familiar with this first hand, but other's here are. I hope they'll chime in. What you might have is a transmission that's putting itself and the car into Limp Home mode. When you restart, you're sort of resetting the computer and it drives fine again. You could also have a bad Mass Air Flow Sensor (the big round goodie at the top of the air filter housing). It could be failing, putting the car in Limp Home mode, etc. This may turn into something better left for a good German car/Audi shop. Yes, they will charge you to tell you what's wrong, and then charge you again to fix it. That's the nature of the repair industry and you can't expect mechanics to be working on your car for free.

3)coolant blowing out of the coolant bottle. This is likely due to the jackasses at Midas who drained and flushed the system, and did nothing to purge the air from it after they refilled it. What you probably now have is enough air in the system that there are hot spots in the cylinder heads, this causes the coolant to flash boil and then it generates a ton of pressure and beltches out the coolant bottle. To fix this, mix up some 50/50 coolant/water. Remove the coolant cap. Start the engine and turn the heat on "HI" temp and a low fan speed. Set it to blow out the dash vents so you can feel it. Now run the car at about 2 grand in the driveway, and keep checking and topping up the coolant level. It's going to gurgle and belch while you do this so keep the rpm's up to circulate the coolant thoroughly and rapidly. Once you feel heat coming out of the dash vents, you know the air is nearly out of the system. Shut the engine off, let it cool for a few minutes and it'll chug down a bunch of coolant. Top it off, start the engine and let it idle until the radiator fans start cycling on and off. Top up as needed and then put the cap back on.

islingtonaudi

Sorry, my mistake. How's school by the way?

VOoDOoGTX

Alright so after work im going to get the part numbers and everything from my car and install it myself. Also ill be purging the system, dosent sound hard at all . Hey im not expecting anyone to fix it for free im just expecting someone to tell me exactly whats wrong and fix it

Thank you so much for that response its made things alittle clearer for someone that knows nothing about cars.

DaveInSaltLake

If your check engine light is still on you should have the codes read and write them all down. Most of the big chain auto parts stores will read the codes for free.

There are links to references here that will give you more details about what the codes mean than Autozone will tell you. Plus, folks here who have had the same codes can tell you what they've done to fix them.

I also saw below that you're planning on buying 'all the parts'. There are a few online parts sources that will save you quite a bit of $$. I always shop/price autohausaz.com worldimpex.com gprparts.com germanautoparts.com and a few others I have bookmarked. Napa and Carquest are other decent sources to check.

austinado16

If you search the archives from our forum, you'll find a guy who had oil in his coolant about 1 or 2 months ago. He came up with a neat way to test the oil cooler "in-car." He disco'd the coolant hoses and plumbed them together. Then he cleaned out the inside of the cooler by spraying up into it with carb cleaner (I think). Then he fired the car up and let it run in the driveway, as well as went for a drive. He figured (rightly so) that if the cooler was ruptered internally and leaking 60psi oil pressure into the coolant, he'd just have a nice oil leak from it if he drove around.

He found no oil leak from the cooler. So....his diagnosis proved it was the headgaskets.

ltooz_a6_a8_q7

Yes, austinado16 is right, try to understand how the system works and troubleshoot one by one. If you buy an old car, you should know how to fix, especially Audi.
I have a 96 wagon, check engine light comes on all the time, you need the laptop & obdII cable and free software to check for codes, if it's not important, just reset it.
You should learn the basic function of engine and cooling systems, how they're working together.
Normally when oil is in the coolant or vice-versa, it's the head gasket like Austine suggested.
All the shop use the words "tune up" needed for any performance problem. They're there to make money and they're not smart enough or nice enough to spend time and find the real problems.
If the car starts right up, the spark plugs are fine, if it starts up and doesn't drive smoothly, then other things else is wrong.
Take out the spark plugs to see if any of them has coolant deposit.
The coolant squirts everywhere, find the leaks, the hoses can be replaced, replace the hoses first to make sure there are no leaks.
Don't panic, slowly find and eliminate the problem one by one.

Cheers,

PS: No one would care about your cars more than you do, so do the work yourself.

Bmthorn

Great customer service and prices.

heybiff

...intended to be serviced by teh Audi dealership with thier specialized tools, service manuals, and diagnostic equipment. That's what kept me from pulling the trigger on an A8. Audiworld and a little elbow grease will make up for a lot, but the bottom line is it's not a simple car, and it will cost a little more to maintain. OTOH you'll never be able to go baack once you get used to comfort, reasonable performance, and the confidence that comes from driving a nice car.

Have you tried your local Audi/VW dealer? They'll rape you on labor, but with the newer cars they do a reasonable job at diagnosis.