Well, the 'ol Dodge bit me again... Top cover bolts came loose on the getrag; yet again, and since I was on a fairly long highway trip, I didn't notice anything wrong...
I'm assuming it puked a fair amount of oil out, and about 3/4's of the way up the first reasonably steep incline of my trip I felt a lurch in the drivetrain, followed by a vibration... Dropped to 4th immediatley, but it was too late, damage is done. The pocket bearing between the input shaft and output shaft failed... The same as what was the final catastrophic failure in the last transmission, but it had many other issues and made bad noises and jumped out of gear for months, and was not the root cause of it's failure. This was pretty much an instant failure...

Now I'm debating what to do... I was going to work on collecting parts and putting a medium duty trans in there, but I don't have anything done on that yet... I'm half tempted to put an auto in there...

 

now is a good opportunity to upgrade to the nv4500, check forums and stickies, i bought a kit from las vegas drivetrain.com with reman trans, bellhousing, using stock clutch, flywheel, slave, mount adapter. with upgraded main shaft, keyway and lock washer, 5th gear problem is defeated, very dependable transmission. advance adapters sells the conversion parts, or you can get used 2nd gen parts to upgrade.