Project Pat

Good question. I have the official Audi electric extension kit coming today (just happened to find one on Ebay) so I'll get .PDF's of the manual and upload that here if that would help you. I would recommend that you take a look at the Jaeger kit (german) that is plug and play with the rear light clusters, plus I think a positive fused tap, it looks great, but a bit spendy!

I'd be interested to hear how you got on fitting the towbar, was it Audi or GDW and if Audi was it a dealer or factory fit one that was moving?

I got the GDW kit, impressed with the build quality feels massively over engineered, I'm only using it to pull a small trailer with a Motorbike on. The instructions are ok but for the wiring side I only got a handful of splice connectors. Just need to know what the colours mean on the audi loom now :)

That would be very helpful or just ping me a PM. cheers.
 
I got the GDW kit, impressed with the build quality feels massively over engineered, I'm only using it to pull a small trailer with a Motorbike on. The instructions are ok but for the wiring side I only got a handful of splice connectors. Just need to know what the colours mean on the audi loom now :)

That would be very helpful or just ping me a PM. cheers.

Oh, out of interest, when fitting the hats into the chassis leg what size of hole saw did you use? The instructions say 40.5mm but I can only find a 40.
 
Oh, out of interest, when fitting the hats into the chassis leg what size of hole saw did you use? The instructions say 40.5mm but I can only find a 40.

I didn't bother doing those holes. I don't intend on towing anything big. But Ideally I needed a 42mm holesaw, I had one but thought it was quite a faff.
 
I think you are right, I have the parts on order so hopefully get it done soon, I'll put up photos when I've done it, so you can all admire my first attempt! :oops:
 
the 'shaft' dia on the stl file was 40.00mm so ideally a 40.1 or 40.2mm dia hole is needed,
You could use a 'fly cutter', which is a cutter mounted out from a central pin. You drill a hole to suit the centre pin, say 8mm dia, then adjust the cutting tool to the correct Dia and the tool rotates in an electric drill around the 8mm pivot pin and cuts the circle out.
I would want to run out the smallest hole possible, ideally the pin going into the hole would be a snug fit

James - your two spacers left in the post today, royal mail 2nd class, normally a max of 2 days though not guaranteed
Cheers,
Paul
 
Cheers Paul. Do you have a link to the sort of tool you mentioned. Not heard of that before.

Regards

James
 
Has anyone any experience with a Towbar Towball that doesn't want to release. I've got it off and soaked it and worked it but for the life of me I cannot get the thing working, I have to use moley grips to turn the mechanism and it seems to not have any spring action to clip in place and that cannot be good. I'm either a total lightweight or all is not well with it? Is there a breakdown of how the mechanism in it works and how it is serviced does anyone know?
have a look at post #18 on this thread, not sure but it might give you some ideas... @Fallan may have sorted the issue?? cheers nod

 
Oh, out of interest, when fitting the hats into the chassis leg what size of hole saw did you use? The instructions say 40.5mm but I can only find a 40.
Would this be any use to you?


New old stock, but you might find old really means old!

Andy
 
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So when Pat gave up the tow bar I had a bit of an issue. The tow hitch was.... Well it was knackered really. You could either have it on or on!

The only way to get it off was with mole grips and a lot of petience.

Well I am happy to say that after a lot of searching I have received this nice brand new shiny one. Literally brand new! With original Al-Ko instructions, Audi ball cap and two keys. Well chuffed. Now the project can continue
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Regards

James
 
Oh, out of interest, when fitting the hats into the chassis leg what size of hole saw did you use? The instructions say 40.5mm but I can only find a 40.
I would test drill a piece of alloy sheet as the hole saws normally cut slightly over size, on a safety note any use of a fly cutter should only be carried out on a pedestal drill because of the danger associated with this type of cutter snagging the alloy.

Keith.
 
I may get this bit done professionally. Simpler and I don't think there is an 'undo' button ;-)
 
Not sure if this is the correct place to list it, as slightly off topic, but here are the items that I'm reviewing at the moment for my video editing upgrade, the tow bar is still getting worked on, just waiting on final parts from Crewe.

Netgear GS111EMX 10Gb/e switch - https://amzn.to/2LpB1E8
QNAP TS-453BTe 4 Bay 10Gb/e NAS - https://amzn.to/2PCjTAe
Crucial MX500 250Gb M.2 Sata SSD - https://amzn.to/2LgEcz6

Why use a switch and not use USB C straight to the computer? Also for SSDs the sweet spot for price is 500Gb at the moment, are you going to be running raid? Are you editing on a laptop?


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Why use a switch and not use USB C straight to the computer? Also for SSDs the sweet spot for price is 500Gb at the moment, are you going to be running raid? Are you editing on a laptop?

Before anyone reads on - it looks daunting to me and I wrote it!

So have a look at this which is a great and more fun summary.


Apologies didn't see this message come through sir. Massively off topic now, but bear with me whilst I explain...

USB C is not what I need here, I need to cover off some other requirements, which will help explain my rationale. If I go the USB C route I will be limited to single drives and if I use large density cheap-ish spinning platters then I'll simply not get the speed out of them to perform editing. I would also have to be within arms reach of the drives - which will mess with my Zen like office (not really) but I don't want devices all over the place. If I use SSD's for the speed then it will cost a small fortune to get the amount of data storage I need. I've also invested in NAS since 2011 so it would seem silly to lose all the resiliency and have to use stand alone drives, bit of a retrograde step. The 250Gb's were a trial and were based on Sata so I didn't want to go all out, I've now switched to 2 x 500Gb NVME which is much better (speeds of between 1800-2700MB/s vs around 550MB/s on Sata), and as you say definitely the sweet spot at 500Gb

With 10GbE, or 5GbE as I'm sitting on now (more on that below), then I can have the storage up to 100m away from the computer as I'm running Cat7 cabling, and the data is accessible from anywhere I want it to be, or any device for that matter, even simultaneously.

I will be trying out multiple raid setups to get this running the best for me. Raid 1 over Raid 0 for speed and basic resilience, then Raid 5, 6 and 10 etc. All with and without caching and over 5GbE and 10GbE.

Even on basic Raid 5 with no NVME acceleration (and now over 5GbE - as I have moved onto a larger NAS with a better blend of capabilities but lower interface speed) I'm getting the speeds below - which is just about enough to get me to 4K editing. The 5GbE interface will tap out at roughly 500MB/s which is more than ample for editing anything in the 4k range that I can produce.

I also have the option on the switch to run LAPC port aggregation which I have tried on my old NAS with 4 x 1GbE and that worked ok, but it was time for a performance upgrade so I hit the reset button and went for some new kit.

To give an idea of the file sizes I'm looking at. I have imported the video that I took originally for the tow bar work (I'll do the work over again to get the detail right - I'm just learning - but the data size is useful if nothing else). Once imported and made into proxy media we are looking at the thick end of 500Gb of data. I can remove the proxy media when I archive it but that's a significant amount for 1 video and not all of that was at 4k either. I have been known to over-egg the pudding so to speak but I prefer to buy the right things and use them for a long time than to cut corners at the start and either not achieve my goals or be delayed re-visiting things every 5 minutes. Wether I decide to do lots of video's here (I started last year on basic door removal etc but not yet published) or just go for home video editing then

Here is a link to the new NAS I'm running from QNAP. So far a great device - https://amzn.to/338x7qu

Love the feedback and happy to take offline or to the green room as waaaaaaaay off topic now.

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