Something really weird just came up yesterday that people should be 
aware of in case you are buying spares.  Recently I purchased 4 
German joints at an excellent price from the Bus Depot (thanks Ron) 
and as I mentioned in a previous post looked at all of them to answer 
some questions about assembly orientation on new joints.  These were 
to be spares and if I wasn't dying to know they would have sat around 
for months before I looked at them.  So thing was, one of them was 
MISSING a ball.  I emailed Ron immediately who was of course 
instantly willing to exchange at his shipping cost, but as we were 
working a swap for some other parts, I drove up the other day to 
exchange.  Now the one with the missing ball had been previously 
opened and reassembled backwards to boot, so I thought nothing of it, 
just figured his supplier had got it back and sent it out again sort 
of thing never noticing the missing ball.  So off hand when I got my 
new one (Ron had 3-4 sitting there) we opened it up to look at when 
it was built (answer more of my undying CV joint questions) and guess 
what, 1 out of the 3 new ones he had was MISSING ONE BALL, now no way 
these had ever been opened before, unbroken boxes and the paper 
wrapping was as it left the factory (if you unwrap one, you will 
never get the paper back on like new), so only conclusion was they 
left der Fatherland like this.  Ron and I were rather flabergasted 
and not too impreessed to say the least.  He will certainly be 
checking all those he sends out in the future, but a word of warning, 
to anyone buying Lobro CV's anywhere else, if you are buying them as 
spares or will not get around to using them during the return period, 
OPEN THEM UP, and take a look at them.

And the one other interesting piece of info, my new one is a '96 
built joint and back to the old style, has the raised dimple on the 
inner race that the thrust washer origionally set against, and it is 
pointed toward the inside like the cage chamfer, which is how I 
surmised they had origionally been.

John
vwbus@netbiz.net