Changing the front grill on my Audi S5

I realize this blog is about miles and points, but you guys know I veer off track here and there just to keep things interesting.  Anyway, I had bought an Audi S5 about 3 months ago.  When I got the car, I of course immediately went out to the Audi forums to see what people had been doing to mod their A5/S5 (same body) cars.  I even found this site about the 6 best mods for the Audi S5 (I know, it sounds like those stupid sites that have ‘6 best restaurants in XYZ city.’)

One of the things I wanted were some 20″ rims.  The car comes with 19″ rims, and to me, they are just ‘okay’ looking.  Then I realized a new new set of rims cost $2,000.  That’s way more than what I wanted to spend, so I’ll keep looking on CL to see if anything pops up.

Then I thought about the exhaust, but that was too expensive.  Plus, you have to get it professionally installed, and while I’d like to go ‘vroom vroom,’ it just wasn’t worth it.

The last and really, the only thing I wanted to mod, was changing the front grill of the car.  I had intially removed the front license plate when I got it, but even then, I did NOT like the grey plastic looking front grill.  I looked online and there were so many different types – all black, black with chrome trim, chrome with chrome trim, etc.  It took me a couple of weeks to decide on the all black RS5 grill.  Sure, I could have paid almost $1K for an authentic Audi one online, but after reading a couple of threads on satisfied customers from China aftermarket ones for $200, I went ahead and bought one from eBay.  It took about a week to come in.  I then found these tutorials on how to change it yourself – here and an indepth pdf.  Most people said it took between 1-4 hours depending on your skill level.

So it had been a month before I could round up my buddies to help me do this.  Let me first say that all 3 of us are NOT ‘car guys.’  We are pretty much computer nerds.  I didn’t even have all the tools I needed; all I had was one of those 100 piece toolkits that I bought from Costco like 10 years ago and the pdf I sent earlier.  Here is a picture of the before grill:

It took us about 5 minutes to remove the 6 screws on top.  The next step involved removing the wheels, which clearly we could not do.  I had read we could turn the wheels to access the screws behind the front tire, so that’s what we did.  I must have moved the wheels back and forth 10 times.  Once we removed those screws, we got to a point where we had to remove these stupid clips.  For the life of 3 computer guys, we couldn’t figure out how to remove them.  So I just took some needle nose pliers to them, but they still wouldn’t come off without me breaking them.  At this point, we wondered if we should abandon ship and put everything back and take it to a professional, after all, a pro would have jacked the car up and removed the tires, so they could easily remove the clips.  But I kept at the clips for a while longer, and eventually yanked them out.

The next bump in the road was when we tried to pull off the bumper.  We realized that we had to undo some screws from the bottom of the car.  The problem was that my screwdrivers were too long and I couldn’t get the screwdriver beneath the car and the floor.  At this point also, we almost abandoned ship again, but we figured that we were on the 2 yeard line, and puttting everything back now [with the old grill] will be just as painful as if we had the new grill on.  Of course Home Depot was only 10 minutes away, but you know men are stubborn.  Luckily, one of my buddies suggested we jack up the car to remove the screws.  GENIUS!  And so that’s what we did, and we were then able to remove the front bumper assembly as shown below.  By the way, we also noticed that the garage door sensore was never hooked up.  Thanks previous owner!

After we removed the bumper, putting on the new grill was really fast and easy.  We made a bet on whether putting it back on would be MORE or LESS painful than when we removed it.  Everyone agreed it would be MORE painful to put back.  Quick aside – when we were removing teh bumper, there were 2 screws that were upside down that we had to use a 10mm socket wrench.  And guess who had a 10mm socket but no wrench?  I had to blindly feel and remove it by hand, which I thought would have made it impossible to put back together.  But surprisingly, we put it all back together without any major issues.  Total time spent – 2.5 hours.  Another buddy asked how much we thought it would have cost taking it to a professional, and I guessed they probably would have charged 2-3 hours of labor at almost $100/hr.  After everything was completed, I wondered if that was worth our time, and it probably wasn’t.  But there’s a feeling of accomplishment that you get when you do things yourself.  I had never worked on a car before, but now I feel I can do almost anything on the car, which is absurdly not true.

Anyway, here’s the finished product:

Here it is after I decided to wash the car and put on an Instagram filter!

My other random thoughts on the car:

• Almost got into 2 car accidents because I was cocky and overestimated the performance of the car
• I only drive the car to work and when we go somewhere that has off-street parking (I call it the luxury tax)
• The car gets about 16 mpg, but that’s mostly in stop-and-go traffic
• I do park far away when possible (I call it exercise but it’s probably the luxury tax again)
• I don’t drive it to do my Target/Walmart/Kroger runs (just because I want to be in and out as fast as possible)
• I could have paid someone $150 to update the NAV on the car, but since I never use it, I didn’t bother.
• I’ve hand-washed it 3 times now; I don’t know how much longer I plan on doing it
• My wife still hasn’t driven it and has no desire to drive it
• Every day when I get in the car, it still puts a smile on my face – this was mainly the reason I bought it.  YOLO!