Hey Extreme, I spent a few hours with Jerry Magnuson (owner) today getting to understand your issue and expressing your (and mine!) concern. He was VERY accomodating and is genuinely interested in helping determine the cause of the failure and will work with you to minimize the financial aspect of the failure. If it is a manufacturing defect, then there will no charge. But they will need to see it before they can make any real determination and assessment.

There have been very few failures such as this as there is a seal that protects the needle bearings (one of THE most reliable bearing designs) from any debris or harm. Water injection, carburation or extra injectors can sometime penetrate that seal and remove the lube from the bearings but even that is extremely rare. I assured him it was a standard install with nothing exotic going on.

Jerry is committed to taking care of any problems with our units as he understands that we are essentially his customers even though Alpine or I made the sale. I was very impressed with him and the rest of his staff who really took time to explain and discuss many, many things with me today.

And they are serious about the 100K between fluid changes unless there is a problem. There really is only belt tension to deal with. Fluid should be checked with a ~2" strip of white paper inserted inside the check hole after the unit has been run or after spinning the pulley by hand. This would bring any metal particles to the surface and they would intern migrate to the paper as it absorbes the fluid.

If you want to make sure there are no problems, there is no problem changing the fluid at whatever interval you want but the kit from Magnuson is the way to go. Without it, there is NO way to get all fo the fluid out (maybe half) as there is dip below the bearing plate where the fluid pools. It does NOT coat the gears or any moving parts inside but rather is atomized and dispersed throughout the front area. Their kit includes the necessary sealant to reseal the front nose assembly after removing it to get all of the fluid out and also a new dampening ring. We'll post some pictures of the internals of the M62 when return home on Sunday.