I drove it 50 miles on the highway at ~70mph & then around town for a couple weeks, all apparently in this condition. Somehow it was fine. I would LOVE to know (a) how long it was like this and (b) what the long term effects would be. Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely doing the repair. But at the same time it strikes me as odd that setting up gears requires this precise alignment but then I can be this far out and now show any real effect.
Maybe it wasn't enough miles or time, or maybe it only really creates a problem under hard acceleration? Or maybe the precision doesn't matter quite as much as legend would have us believe? Hard to say, since 99% of gears out there were set up professionally or done by people where who took great effort to get good patterns, and the remaining ones are shade tree bubbas who most likely aren't going to report that their "just send it" gear job blew up on them. I know, this is probably heresy but if you think about it we probably don't have a ton of data on the effects of bad gear setups. It's all anecdotal.
Maybe it wasn't enough miles or time, or maybe it only really creates a problem under hard acceleration? Or maybe the precision doesn't matter quite as much as legend would have us believe? Hard to say, since 99% of gears out there were set up professionally or done by people where who took great effort to get good patterns, and the remaining ones are shade tree bubbas who most likely aren't going to report that their "just send it" gear job blew up on them. I know, this is probably heresy but if you think about it we probably don't have a ton of data on the effects of bad gear setups. It's all anecdotal.