My truck has 90,000 on it. I bought it with 83,000 last July, so no way of telling when the disconnect started wearing and to be honest I never thought about inspecting it before this. Now I'm very careful when engaging 4wd...I do it at a slow roll now and turn the wheels back and forth a bit just to be sure it's engaged before applying to much gas. Even with the new unit in there is still a little play in the cv tripod, but from what I have read that's normal. Just for the heck of it i checked the driver side cv tripod last night and it seems to move a bit more than it should. So i don't know if there's much I can do about it or if I should try to replace the outer bearing and seal...any suggestions and/or if its a easy enough job to do. My biggest fear is having a front diff failure because of repair costs.
I was able to drill a couple small holes in the ring part of the housing stuck in the oil pan and then slowly step up until i had a chunk of it out. This relieved the pressure on the ring and it pretty much pulled right out, and I was able to do it without damaging the oil pan at all.