Reverse gear replacement & swearing contest

After a year of nursing a flimsy reverse, Kate came home last week and announced that reverse was completely gone.

Option A: Take it to a shop, have a used transmission installed: $800
Option B: Take the transmission out in the garage, and pull it apart myself.

I had a spare transmission that I could practice on, and it even had a decent reverse idler, so I went with Option B.

Now, I wouldn't want anyone reading this to think that I'm all "old hat" at repairing transmissions. I'm just foolish... I'd never even had one apart before. I did have a decent online DIY guide: http://scirocco.dhs.org/cheapassron/020tranny/index.htm

EDIT: After I did this job, I wrote (what I though was) a fantastic DIY, step-by-step guide to tearing down a VW 020 transmission. Turns out there is one out there now:
http://www.brokevw.com/teardown.html
This link is FANTASTIC... much more detailed than the 1st one (as helpful as that was). In fact, I've jettisoned the whole tech article, because there is NO WAY I'd do as good a job as they did.

Anyway, pulled the car into the garage on Friday night, drove out on sunday. Flushed the gear oil 3 times in the subsequent weeks to get rid of the little bitzas and chunkits of the old reverse. Huge improvement in all gears, and I even swapped in a taller 5th for highway cruising... 120 km/hr is now a lazy 2900 rpms!

Here's some pics:

















































































The culprit:















Homemade tools:

5th gear shift fork tool















Case splitter: