With the new flywheel and clutch installed I reattached the transmission.

I am waiting on the BW K04’s to arrive so I can start reattaching the various turbo lines, so I turned my attention to the front end and the brakes and suspension upgrades.

Removing the front lower control arm was quite the challenge.  The ball joint remover alone was not getting anywhere, the gear puller was not either, so I combined applying the ball joint tool with a pair of hammers to hit both sides of the lower upright simultaneously.

That did the trick, freeing the pesky ball joint.

The rest of the nuts and bolts have taken some torque to loosen, but so far I haven’t had any others that required taking unusual steps to free up.

Today the engine came out.  Detaching the driveshaft from an S4 that has never had the driveshaft disconnected before is fun, boy those bolts are in there good.  The driveshaft is also well attached to the transmission, even without the help of the bolts.

I tried something different this time to free the driveshaft from the transmission.  I put the car in gear, raised the driver side rear wheel and gently rocked the wheel back and forth until the driveshaft popped free from the transmission.  Much easier than laying under the car trying to pound the driveshaft free.

I was extremely pleased to have almost no coolant loss when removing the heater core hoses, there’s been times in the past where this part of the removal has produced a big mess on my garage floor.

Today I got around to draining the rear differential fluid as it has been about 500 miles since I installed an MFactory Limited Slip Differential.  I wanted to change the fluid in the event the initial use shed metal particles into the differential fluid.

With the fluid changed I began repairing a broken drivers inside door handle spring.  Instead of going the low cost route and replacing only the spring I ordered a set of RS4 door handles.

I stopped at replacing just the driver’s door handle; I have a set of turbine housings to clean up so they can be shipped to Swaintech for ceramic coating.