Day 27 - Carbon Stone Guards & Gearbox Oil (4 Hours)

Dale joined me for a couple of hours, or that was the plan! Thanks Dale. :-)

Job 86 - Carbon Stone Guards

Following the removal of the rear wings yesterday, it seemed appropriate to position and fit the Carbon Stone Guards on the rear wings. With 2 of us working on them it was an quick and easy job.

Carbon Stone Guards lined up ready for riveting

 Job 87 - Gearbox Oil

Oh my lord! What a painful job this was! We started by trying to manoeuvre a pipe supplied by fellow builder Andrew Bissell, but being an S3 it is very tight between the gearbox and transmission tunnel I couldn't get the pipe to sit securely in enough, more oil ended up in the catch tray than the gearbox!

Next course of action was to find some thiner pipe, we ended up using some left over washer pipe! It was somewhat thinner and as a result it was easier to insert, the flip side being that it took us just over 3 hours to put 1.3 litres of gearbox oil in the gearbox! Plenty of time to chat and catch up!

Filling the gearbox using pipe and a tiny funnel!

Pipe running along side the transmission tunnel into the gearbox

Once the oil started dribbling out of the gearbox it was time to get the plug in! A messy job it had to be said, but the plug & allen key solution worked a treat. I used a 10mm spanner to turn the allen key and hence do up the plug a quarter of a turn at a time.

It took a bit of time to get the plug correctly aligned so that it would bite in the tread of the gearbox. I would recommend marking up the plug with a paint pen in the location where it bites before putting the oil in the gearbox.

My recommendation to others, fill the gearbox before it goes in the car! I hope these tips help someone else!