Good catch. You must have been great at "Where's Waldo". ;-)

But I'm talking about functional differences. Those bosses are not used on the X5 application.

Just looked at the OEM representation and the bosses are present on those.

I'm curious if that slight casting difference may be the differentiation between the NV part numbers "41438" and "42924".

The cases differ only in those 3 bosses (one isn't well seen in the photos).

The original has "41440" cast on that half of the case. The replacement (without the bosses) is "42926".

The other half of both cases has the same "27731" cast into it.

I'm surprised that no one seems to readily know the differences between these, although I mainly deal with cars that people "willingly" tear into. My goal with this one is to prevent having to do that again.

I have to admit that all of the horror stories everyone that you come in to contact with who have worked on these kind of made me cringe when I brought it home, but so far it hasn't been that bad to work on. The ABS module was probably the most annoying so far (simply from the limited space to work) but the t-case was surprisingly simple, and the front diff/front suspension stuff wasn't worse than much else out there.

Had I known that the 3.0 (auto--I'll preface this time) was the same, I certainly would have bought a local one and just sorted through it (seals/bearings/chain) as opposed to buying a re-man. I had the original apart to the point of removing the output shaft (note in the picture that the previous hack that worked on this thing "solved" the spline issue by welding a spline section onto the output of the t-case) and back together in about 15 minutes. The front diff would have taken about 30 minutes to repair (pinion shaft bearings had too much play), but the splines on the input for the companion flange are seized (they may have shifted).

I actually had a machine shop give removing the companion flange a try--towards the end, after giving them the "okay" to give it whatever they could, they had it cherry red and 20 tons of pressure on it and it still didn't budge.