Before the body was delivered to Terry's Beetles (actually while waiting for my slot to come up) I thought I'd do the gearbox and return the rideheight to what I thought would be normal. 

The gearbox was removed complete with driveshafts for rebuild by Cogbox. Removing it was fun and without the right bearing puller for the driveshaft bearings the axle tubes had to come out with the box. All a bit unweildly to move around and transport. Thank goodness for company cars. Pics show complete box from car and a rarely seen Peter E from Cogbox early one Saturday morning. Scary sight - yep.

Took a week to do and the rebuild was not cheap at 500+ quid but I'm sure a worthwhile investment. Cogbox ended up replacing the driveshafts, diff assembly, all synchro's, 4th gear, all bearings including driveshaft, one piece original boots and even the case. I chose to leave it at 6V 180mm spec instead of machining out to accept a 12V in the future. Perhaps short sighted.

Box back in the bug before being taken to Terry's. Also fitted new gearbox mounts on the nose and rear carrier. You can also see that the first batch of powder coating came through for the gearbox carrier.

Returning to original ride height was fun too. In retrospect I think this would have been easier if all the parts had been in the car making it easier to slip the plates onto the splines and all the way home. I chose to rasie the ride height by one turn on the outer splines. According to the Volksworld magazine this would increase by about 3 cm. We'll only see if that was right at the end with everything on it.

After refit gearbox kept leaking from the bearing carriers all over the garage floor.  Realising where this was coming from took a little while and after several attempts at flatting the bearing carrier with sand paper on a workbench top I ended up powder coating the rear brake back plates - this seemed to form all the right amount of sealing faces and I'm now oil tight.