Hi, sorry, longish.

I have seepage too, not severe so I'm leaving it.

To replace seal you need to:

- undo inner CV and push the axle out of the way

- wipe the grease out of the flange and extract the inner 1" diam. cover,
sharp screwdriver/knife tip

- remove circlip (or was it a bolt?) holding flange to diff shaft, and slide
(hopefully) or tug/pull/curse the flange out.

- undo 2 screws and remove black plastic locking collar, Phillips screws
likely rusted in/strippable head, replace with bolts and flat washer. If you
screw it up and strip case just tap in next size metric and use bolt also.

- scribe a small mark across the aluminium bearing housing and the trans
case. This is just in case extracting the seal makes the bearing move, which
screws up the preload on the R&P gears!!!! Unlikely it will move at all :)

- try and get seal out, just try! Get a real seal puller, it is a thick/deep
seal with steel inside rubber. Go to dealer/vendor for OEM replacement,
$45Cdn up here.  Lemme know your best price/source pls. Seal has triple
lips, don't settle for shallower 2 lip version, they are at any bearing
supply house for $8Cdn. I was told to put in two of th thin ones, and may do
so rather than pay the dealer.

- iff'm I remembers... you should pack the seal with grease before installing?

- definately repack the flange pocket with grease, or your CV will, by
chucking it out of the joint!!

- cheap trix.....   hard to do unless you do remove the bearing housing for
proper access, but there is a coil spring inside that loads the seal onto
the flange's shaft.  Remove it, cut it apart and cut a few mm. from it, then
rewind it together and slip it back in, Voila 'renewed seal'

Warning - DO NOT blindly unscrew the bearing housing, as the scribe mark is
only for final re-positioning, you need to know the _depth_ to the face of
the bearing housing wrt. the trans face, need dial gauge, mounting bar etc.
May get lucky if you simply count the number of turns until it came out.....  ;)

have fun, this works at trans seals also, same seal part#'s, identical at
each end, finally VW did something right. Maybe it was SDP.

bye, Tim

PS: if you indo the big axle nut, then you can pull out the axle and do a
full repack of both CVs if getting near their time. This per the recent
sentiments over 'planned maintanance' ahead of 'breakdown maintanance'. I
use castrol Syntec grease in the big gun tubes, and put 3 or 4x as much as
Bentley says, just stuff'em, grease is cheap (little moly packets aren't).
Has stood up to usual Syncro abuse fine for 1.5 years.