edit: referencing the " h&r sport springs GTI" video referenced several posts earlier.
the guy in the youtube video has a possible explanation for you. He explains why it's important to remove the bearings with care and what can happen if you don't.
It's a nice video. When I installed camber plates (which came with their own sealed upper bearing), I painter's tape wrapped the bearings to keep them together, before removal:
Interesting point about the bearings. Over the life of the 2 mk7 I've had I definitely encountered one bearing that had especially noticeable play between what appear to be the upper and lower races of the bearing, though I'm fairly certain no ball bearings were lost.
I'm especially interested in these bearings because there is so much talk of bearing issues and yet so little known/explored in terms of the cause of failure and what the failure looks like. I'm hoping that people with bad bearings will start to crack them open and photograph the internals so we, the internet, can see what is going on, whether the bearing tracks are scored, or things or bent, bearings missing, etc etc.
Edit: this concept of rough handling being the cause of failure makes perfect sense because the recurring story on the forums is always "I have 5k miles on my car and now I have noise after XYZ install".
