Now i feel lucky. Took mine off during the last round of upgrades just to see and it was clean. 51,000 miles and still looking good. Dodged that bullet so far so good.
Well finally got the shaft out, and it is the inner bearing that is toast and it is in backwards. I didn't remove the headers or the TB's as per the manual, but I did remove the exhaust as you can see, with the help of some buddies we lifted the frame off the engine relatively easy. Now I get to clean a whole bunch and I might as well check my valves while the engine is out. I did find one other issue that really surprised me, the nut at the end of the Transmission output shaft came off just by turning it by hand! its supposed to be torqued to 145Nm!
You can see the punch mark they put on the nut,,,my guess is the punch wasn't struck hard enough, it looks like the dimple is following the threads right out,