[T3] My Type 34 weekend

[Daniel Baum <daniel@type34.info>]

<x-flowed>Hi all,

My Type 3 weekend was a bit of a nightmare frankly.

I finally got around to putting the driveshafts back in. I will _never_ 
do this again. Although it went fairly straighforwardly, it is such a 
horrible job that next time it needs doing I will pay someone else to do 
it. Why would anyone want to do this for a living?

I still cannot believe the amount of revolting sticky grease you have to 
put on them. All I can say is _wear gloves_! I did, luckily, or I would 
be picking grease out of my fingernails for a month.  I got through 
about half a box of disposible gloves.

Who was it who said that he'd never seen black CV joint grease? Well 
mine was black. I got it from the VW dealer in Jerusalem if you want some.

But the biggest nightmare was putting them in. Trying to line up the 
first bolt with the hole while hanging on to it with greasy hands and 
desparately trying not to drop the whole thing ito the dirt. And then 
torquing the bolts and trying to manoever my large torque wrench in the 
poky space. For those of you who've never tried it, access to the CV 
joints  in an automatic is BAD. Rather than turn the hub so I could get 
the wrench in the bolt, get up each time, put on the handbrake and then 
get under and torque each one individually, I held onto the hub for dear 
life with one hand and my knees, and torqued the bolts with my other 
hand. It worked, but I'm never doing it again.

One thing that saved my from failure was my decision to use a complete 
set of new bolts, and a new socket. Some of my old ones were partially 
rounded out and it would have been a bigger nightmare if I had used them.

Also yesterday, I realised (with the help of a friend who turned up 
unexpectedly) that my engine is only running on three cylinders. So I've 
got something to do next weekend after all...

Daniel


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