Whoa, lots of shock tech.....but back to the topic at hand. I ripped into the truck this afternoon, and after many many screws were pulled out and having to take many things apart, I found at least one of my main problems: the front diff's pinion gear had 3 teeth blown out. I don't know if this is the only issue, but I'll check the tranny by spinning the spur witout the front stuff attached to see if there's still some resistance. If I wanted to, I could even hook up the batts and see how it spins via the motor, but that might be too much. Either way, this truck is a pain to work on, so I'm hoping that tear downs will be few and far between, because you have to take the whole truck apart just to fix one dumb little thing!