Shertex did offer a pretty balanced response. My concern is that there might be unintended consequences for the valet despite his " Something broke and it is going to the shop for investigation."

Like it or not, minimum wage workers are somewhat disposable and if any issues arise they can be fired and a replacement quickly found. ( Not that I'd do something like this. ) The best way to keep workers under control is to have a "anything breaks or is missing you are gone " policy.

This situation is also what shops sometimes face where a car just packs up through no fault of the shop but the shop is on the hook even though they have done nothing wrong. Any insurance that a shop carries is for large losses like $ 10 K not a few thousand that they would pay out of pocket. Anyone that has a very close personal relationship with a shop can hear some stories of things gone wrong.

I've got over 320K on my 300D 2.5's transmission. Aside from the governor issue the last 80K (my ownership) have been largely without issue.

The governor gear, and the gear it meshes with are plastic. The 722.3 gears were metal IIRC.



Some photos of when my governor gears failed:
http://imgur.com/a/GNveY

Shertex - nice to see a man of character.

By way of an update, it is likely that the culprit is a check valve in the secondary pump assembly. The working assumption is that that check valve came apart and the spring from the check valve got mangled in the pump gears, which in turn took out the governor gear.

An MB master tech gave me some guidance over email...do you think my mechanic will give me a "research discount?" ;)

Confirmed: it was the check valve that came apart that caused the whole problem.

Getting a new front pipe too...will be interesting to see the final tally!