Well previous owner is my misses nephew, he stopped driving it because of a banging. I got it off the road and every rotation there was a bang and a thud. So I removed the prop, on doing so solved the thud. I then progressed to blank it off. On removing the pinion I found that two of the teeth had between 1/2 & 3/4inch chips but the rest off pinion had a sound body with no visual cracks or fractures.
Draining the IRD never produced a large amount of metal or metal shavings. Just getting round to getting it on ramp is difficult bit.