First of all, cars or anything with an engine and wheels are why I get up in the morning.
I blame the addiction on my oldest brother, who brought my mom and I home from the hospital when I was born.  He had his license for a whole week and picked us up in a '52 Ford with a flathead V8 and glasspacks.

I have worked in bodyshops, automotive machine shops and then when it was time to start a family I took my first factory job. A sad day.....but that was reality.

I got involved in computer programming in the '90s and actually got my BS in IT as an adult. I do .NET and Oracle for a living, mostly machine data collection and repoprting.  My daughters are engineers and my son is an officer in the US Army. I'm very proud of them, and also happy they are through their schooling which means I now have the time and money to pursue my passion as a hobby.

Although I still have a '72 Chevelle SS and a '69 Camaro SS (wife's) I haven't touched them in years, as I discovered Audis via a 1988 90 Quattro approx 10 years back.  I appreciate the engineering that the Germans used and that led me to sell the Harley and get a BMW R1150RT motorcycle for fair weather commuting.

My new project will allow me to learn engine management, forced induction and generally update my skills to the 21st century.

I just picked up a 2000 A4 Avant, and the idea is to transplant the driveline from a wrecked 2000 A6 2.7 MT car I already have. I admit I chose the year of the Avant to minimize the number of controls and sensors that would need to change.  I've read a couple books on Engine Management, started going though the S4 WIki pages and now I have to learn everything I can find here, and also on Chiptuners.org.

Although when I worked in Sony's last North American TV plant I was in the mount department (we populated bare circuit boards), I suck at soldering. But I do still have contacts with guys who excelled at fine pitch board repair.

Warning, I will be asking a lot of questions, please be patient.. Understand I respect the work that you all have done before I came along.

Thanks for the soapbox

Bruch