The chassis teardown ends!

Armed with a shiny new 26mm socket I set about dismantling the last few parts of the chassis. I am pleased to say everything went smoothly this week and I sustained virtually no cuts or abrasions!

First of all I decided to unbolt the starter motor from the transmission casing:

Then I detached the rear shock absorbers, which is achieved by undoing a few nuts and bolts….

And they are off (but looking incredibly warn and filthy)! .....

Next I detached the clutch cable by removing the wing-nut that I have circle in the image below:

Just behind the transmission (underneath where the rear seat once sat) is a small inspection hatch which is held in place by a single cross headed screw:

This gave me access to the coupler that hooks the shift rod to the transmission. The square headed bolt that I have circled below just needed to be loosened to allow the shift rod to detach:

The axle tubes are held in place by three bolts. Please note that in the picture below only two of the bolts are visible and the third is obscured by the axle tube itself. It is behind there though, I promise!

I used my new 26mm socket combined with the breaker bar to take out the rear transmission nuts. Below you can see the left hand side one coming out and the right hand side one I have circled:

To release the handbrake cables from the rear brake drums I had to remove a cluster of nuts located on top of the handbrake, which I have circled below. In case you are wandering, I am pretty sure these improvised spacers (aka: unaesthetic stack of miss-matched nuts), which effectively increase the tension on the cables, are not standard VW issue:

Once the ends of the cables are loose they can be drawn out of the tubes at the rear of the car:

My next task was to remove the rear wheels and prop the chassis up on axle stands. Using my trusty trolley jack and a small piece of wood, I supported the weight of the transmission before attempting to pull it free:

All that remained was the removal two more smaller nuts that held the end of the transmission casing to the chassis. This is where the left hand side one was hiding:

.....and the right hand side:

After a small tug the transmission was free:

At this point the only other thing I could remove from the chassis was the pedal cluster. So I did. This cover plate is on the opposite side of the central tunnel to the pedals:

With the cover removed you can see the operating lever which the accelerator cable hooks onto. The lever was easily removed by taking off the spit pin (top red arrow in picture below) and the circlip (indicated by the bottom red arrow):

The lever then just pulls loose leaving just the end of the accelerator rod protruding from the tunnel:

Once the accelerator rod was drawn out from the other (driver's) side, the pedals were free to be lifted out. Using a small screwdriver I coaxed loose the 'guide-tube-backing-plate-thingy' and pulled it out of the tunnel:

And so at the end of the day this is what was left of my bride n' joy.......