I did mine in January and there are a few posts I made when I got stuck, which will give you an idea.
Once the wheel, hub/disc and caliper are out of the way (I tied the hub/disc and caliper to the damper spring) it's basically a case of removing the lower wheel arch liner, then the airbox... and the pipes to the inlet manifold. This gives you access to the gearbox itself.
Drain the gear oil. There's an Allen headed drain bolt near the bottom of the box (but facing the wheel/your face .. not "under" the gearbox itself).
You'll find it easier to undo the gearbox mounts if the battery is completely out of the way (and the battery support tray) but I dunno if anyone ever managed to do the job with these in place.
Without the battery tray it's simple to remove the gear cables (back of the box) and undo the gearbox support mount. Again, I dunno the best technique but I removed the big nyloc nut and then also unbolted the inner wing bracket from the inner wing (2 bolts)... and also the bolts holding the gearbox mount to the gearbox (3 bolts).
These last two operations were just to make the box easier to extract. The nyloc nut is the one that holds the gearbox to the inner wing bracket). The gearbox mount could possibly come out with the box.
You'll need to support the gearbox when you get this far/removal of the nyloc nut... so do this last.
Before that, I also undid all the bell-housing bolts and nuts. They're variously 18 or 19mm.. and from memory there are about 10 of them. The gearbox won't move with all these undone, so you can take all these out and not worry about anything falling off.
You need to unplug the hydraulics.. Lift the "U" clipand just pull the tube out of the plastic stub (the stub is part of the CSC). I used a brake line clamp on the pipe first (to stop all the fluid leaking out... but with a bit of thick paper to prevent the clamp cutting the rubber. My clamp is a bit "sharp".
There are a couple of electrical cables and brackets attached to the gearbox.. but you can unclip/unscrew these as you see them.
The gearbox essentially pulls out (3" or so to clear the studs) then you have to rotate it forward so you can pull it out further to clear the drive shaft. If you have the car 3 feet in the air and have a gearbox support it's probably not tooooo tricky. If the gearbox is balanced on a trolley jack and the car is just "jacked up" then there's little room and you will swear a lot..
The CSC is only held on by 3 x M6 bolts. Take the old one off, put the new one on with the stub poking through hole in the casing for the hydraulics. It's dead simple/obvious when you get that far.
The clutch (which you should change if it's remotely worn) is a regular 12 (?) M6 bolted to the flywheel.
Refitting is the opposite of dismantling. The gear oil filler is a hex/"drain key" type bolt on top of the gearbox - identical to the drain bolt (tighten that one up first).
Getting the gearbox on needs a burly mate (I used the lad next door) or some means to lift it off the ground.. hook the drive-shaft on and then rotate it round and push it onto the studs. It's heavy rather than "difficult".
It took me 3 weekends..
though I was changing any manky bolts and cleaning things up, replacing clips and brackets etc. as I went (e.g. it's a good time to remove/clean the EGR valve)... and I needed the burly lad next door to provide some "beef"... But if you take the time to see what has to come off, it's almost self-evident what you need to do.
Ralf S.
