There was nothing overly heavy duty about those transmissions. Failures seemed to occur starting at around 25000 miles.
When I built my M151A2, I used the best components out of the 30 that I had salvaged. I used a fairly freshly rebuilt transmission which had been rebuilt by Wes-trans out of Winnipeg. It started to fail after less than a thousand miles. On tear down, I found that while everything still fell within specifications, they were all at the outer tolerances, and combined together, it just didn't work out.
The main weaknesses I always found with the M151A2 were all those u-joints (and operators who thought it was somebodies else's job to grease them), and a big weakness was the poorly designed rear suspension hangers. They were basically a 3/8 bolt going through two 1/8" plates. The holes would elongate, causing a dangerous slop in the rear suspension.
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