How to remove headlamp pods

I haven't been able to find much help for this and the workshop manual is a bit vague, so this is a useful record for me of what I did and maybe it will prove helpful for someone else in the future.

When the bonnet came off the car, it caused a little bit of damage to the pods and so I wanted to take them out to investigate how they could be repaired. The brackets for the bonnet were also damaged and so I need to look at replacing these. As you can see, one of the brackets is badly distorted and a bit of the carbon fibre from the underside of the bonnet is still attached. There is also quite a bit of rust and only 1 split pin was intact - the others were either already broken off or cam off when I attempted to remove the brackets. When you get the split pins off, you can wriggle the brackets towards the outside of the car and they will eventually work their way out of the bushes. The next step is to get the retaining screws out from the wings on each side. Unfortunately, this isn't simple as you need to get hold of the nut on the back of the screw inside the wing. The trick is in trying to retain the nut in the spanner once you've loosened and removed the screw. This requires a bit of contortion of the wrists while holding a 10mm spanner in one hand and a socket wrench with an extension bar in the other! On the driver's side (the hole is shown in the picture after the pod has been removed) you can reach around without too much difficulty, but on the opposite side, you need to unhook the washer bottle first. 

With the screws out, the next step is to undo the pushrod from the motor. This is pretty straightforward and you can make access a little easier by using the hand wheel at the back of the motor to manually move the pivot point.

The picture on the left shows the motor after the pushrod for the pod has been removed - the connecting screw has been left in. On the right is the removed pod with the pushrod still connected.

The final step is to detach the wires for the lamps. This would be very simple if there was a connecting plug outside of the lamp pod, but not surprisingly, that isn't the case! There is a grommet on one side of the pod at the back which can be prised off and you can reach in with your hand and get to the plug on one of the lamps, but the other one has to be removed from the front before you can pull it through the grommet hole. Undio the screws that retain the chrome surround and then the lamp will be easy to remove. Unplug the cable and then feed it back through the grommet hole and at last you can remove the lamp pod.

No doubt the first of many 'simple' jobs for me that turn out to be a bit fiddly!