Very simple pulling a drive off an on is less than a half hour job with or without steering! One bolt on the tie bar and one on the drive.

If you have IMCO steering they will have to drill and tap for the rear cap.

send a pm to MR Gadgets here on oso, he should be able to fill you in on all your options and possibly repair and beef up your existing drive

I just had my upper gear fail and had the whole thing repaired for $3700. My case was fine and the lowers were OK, but your quote sounds a bit high... not sure of what else you may have to have replaced. I've got ext-steering, etc.

Give this guy who ran this ad a call
http://www.offshoreonly.com/classifi...o14715-en.html

He may have something. ( he had a B1X upper listed recently)

A friend of mine trashed his B1 upper,
and got a new B1 from him very reasonable.
( like $ 2K)

I tore down the lower and cleaned it out,
checked it out and reassembled, and it's
back in business.

The install number is nuts!

Just had one drive freshened, had the marina check alignment, lube shaft and coupler, and reinstall that one. Then also pull to check alingment, lube shaft and coupler, and reinstall the second one. Full hyd steering etc, bill had 1 hour @ 90 per, less prefered customer discount, think it cost me 75 bucks for the whole deal, I did have to top off the gear lube myself.

I had pulled the drive myself and could have easily reinstalled it, but I wanted the alingment checked out, so I had them do it. Only fair, they have the tool, and had turned the drive around for me in a few days. No lost boating time is worth a couple bucks. But 600 bucks to install one drive? Nuts!!!

Buy new drive - slap it on.

Sell the old one!