Thanks for all the info Gary, and Steve. And you've anticipated my follow-up Q: Have any recommended MB discount place to get the parts from? Sounds like that's half the battle... I assume I should stick w/OEM as much as possible, should this also extend to the tie rods, or is that not really necessary?

As for the Braingears site, it's great when I can get it to work, but often after navigating to the particular document group I'm interested in, I'll click on one after another and only get the "not available on this server" message, instead of it initiating the pdf download. I'm browsing in Safari.