I decided to take it easy today and just do some of the minor stuff that needed to be taken care of before the T56 gets installed.  After about 20 minutes of fighting the oil cooler lines and fill tube, I decided it wasn’t worth it to pull them out in once piece and just took the cutoff tool to them.  A mere 30 seconds later they are gone and in the trash, good riddance.

Next I removed the flexplate and set it aside with the old tranny.  At this point I figured that since I was this deep in, I might as well go ahead and change the rear main seal.  It wasn’t in terrible condition but did have a small leak at the bottom of the crank.  Afterward I installed the pilot bearing which was a bit more of a job than I expected.  Ended up having to wack on it pretty good with a washer, 1/2″ extention bar and a hammer to get it into the crank.  But once that was done, it was easy going for the clutch.  I cleaned up the flywheel with brake cleaner and bolted it in.  It was much heavier than the A4 flexplate was.  Next up was getting the friction plate in with the alignment tool and after cleaning the pressure plate contact surface with more brake cleaner it too went in.  Here is a shot of it all installed, aligned and torqued down.

I went ahead and pulled the bellhousing off the T56 but was getting a little tired at that point so I decided not to crawl under the car again for today but to do a little clean up on it instead.  Here is a before and after of the bellhousing.  It was a wee bit dusty so I attacked it with more brake cleaner and tried to get as much of the gunk off as I could.  It’s not sparkling but it does look alot better than it did before.

It will most likely be next weekend before I have time to mess around with it again but I’ll see how the work week goes and maybe can fit a couple hours here or there in.