Bearings hardly ever wear out absent running it low on oil. Seals shoudl be enough. Don't forget the center shaft seal which is normal what is leaking.

 

Would the center shaft be what they refer to as the intermediate pin in the diagram below? That one I guess can oval out the case on the front side. Both mine appear to be leak free.

 

You remove the round plate on the back of the TC (PTO Cover in diagram above), remove Transfer gear set and you are looking right at that #5 bolt. Remove it and out comes the transmission output shaft. Making for a very effortless TC removal job. That and removing the entire Ebrake assembly makes it a very straight forward job.

 

Yep, that's it. O-ring seal at the front gets hard and brittle over time, leaks. Put new o-ring on, slather it with hi-torque silicone (gray stuff), and put it back in. Tight nut another 1/4 turn and let her rip.

 

Hi Extinct, Thanks for the info. As for the center shaft removal. Is there any trickery to this? Youtube videos make it out to be fairly complicated to get reset with preload etc.

 

You can of course reset the preload if you desire, however if you re-use the existing nut and turn just an 1/8 to 1/4 turn past the original staking point you are essentially coming back to the original preload. When the preload is set on the original bearings it is based on zero wear new bearings, I assume yours have 100k+ wear on them so a small amount of additional preload essentially compensates for that.