Very clean car. Congrats. Small, medium and large torque wrenches are needed. If you are compulsive about torque specs, some of the torque specs are pretty low around this car. For those 1.5 to 20 Nm tightening specifications I have a click style torque wrench set for bicycles with a torque range of 1 to 25 Newton-meters. The bicycle torque wrench sets usually come bundled with bits for around 60 bucks and can be found at your local bike shop or your favorite online book sellers and auction sites.
Triple square bolt heads are all over these cars. A set of 'stubby' triple square sockets can be very handy.
An extra-small, flex-head 1/4" ratchet gets used a lot.
For regular maintenance, a fluid extractor saves the pain of dropping the belly pan for oil changes. Speaking of oil changes - keep an eye on the baffle that sits inside the oil fill hole - that thin metal plate is held in place by only a couple metal tabs folded over the main valve cover assembly and has been known to get knocked into the cam tray, maybe by an overly aggressive oil change tech. Very bad, very expensive damage results.
VAG has plenty of specialty tools for these cars. Luckily if the need arises to acquire one or more of the hand tools most of them have less costly knock-offs available. Baum usually makes a high quality product. Schwaben tools, IMO, are adequate for the guy working on his own stuff but will not stand up to a lot of use. I'm one of those guys and own products from both companies. Also speaking from experience, the knock-offs from China are a gamble concerning fit and quality, and the potential to get burned and put the project on an unneeded pause is one to consider.
The best tool you can buy right now, though, is a one day subscription at
https://erwin.audiusa.com and order the Factory Service Manuals for your VIN. I think it's $35. On the top navigation menu for the page, point your mouse to "My Account" and select "Subscriptions". I don't remember much past that point, but you're a grown up; you'll figure it out. You will also want to sort and categorize them once you have them downloaded.
For parts research, if you can get your hands on the ETKA, or electronic parts catalogue, it's way faster than trying to navigate AudiParts, ECS, FCP, et al. If you can't get your hands on one, there is an online alternative. It appears to be from Russia, maybe, and it's slow to open. I dunno, I'm weird, so I clear my browser cache and history and connect through a VPN and a new, sandboxed VM before I go here:
https://audi.7zap.com/en/usa/ . Once it is open, the site operates at decent speed. I only use it to look at assemblies and derive part numbers which I then use to shop at my favorite vendors.
The FSM's have all of the procedures and diagnostics laid out, including torque specs, but do not have part numbers. The ETKA has part numbers but no other info. When you are doing your research and work you'll bounce around between different sections and even different FSM's (some steps here, some steps there). You will want to pay attention to whether bolts are TTY, or torque to yield, which must be replaced with new if removed. There are a fair amount of these bolts on the car, and they are designed to be stretched into place only once. You'll want to order the correct bolts before you start pulling parts. Otherwise you'll find yourself waiting two days for new bolts to arrive.
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Originally Posted by MongoMcG
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