Yes, I pulled the clips and the left side came right out. Let me bring you up to speed on what I did.

The car had a clunking while moving from drive to reverse, and even clunked pretty good while going 30 or 40 and apply throttle and let off.

I raised the rear left wheel and measured about 3.5 inche of play at the tread, way too much. Most of the play looked to be in the differential itself, not the flex plates. I compared it to my 1980 240D, and it has about 0.75 or 1 inch of play at the tread.

So I ordered and received a salvage yard differential, 3.07 ratio. During the teardown, I couldn't get the right axle off, so I just dropped the whole differential with the right axle. Like I said in the beginning, the left side slid right out.

After I got the cover off, I found the source of all the play. There is a pin in the center of the differential that rides in a hole. The hole was elongated, and the pin would move back and forth about 1/4 inch, which causes lots of slop at the wheel.

Anyway, I now have the new diff in, and the left axle in, and the fuel hose that I touched, and it sprung a leak fixed, but I can't get the right axle out of the old differential. I worked about 5 hours on it alone today, and moved it about 3/4 of an inch, but can't get it to move any more.

I'm thinking the splines must be trashed, so maybe any more effort on it is wasted, since the diff is toast and probably the axle splines are bad.

I'm wondering if anyone has seen this type of failure before. I've posted up on the tech portion of the site, but so far only one person tried to help, but he hadn't seen the problem personally.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Joe