[Kevin Sevcik]

My experience with the FP pinions is that they're a lot more difficult to remove than you'd expect. The pretty much laugh at miniature gear pullers, if you can even fit the gear puller over the gear.

We usually assume we're never going to use the gear again, and squish it. They're made of soft-ish metal, so if you squish it REAL hard in a vise, turn it 90 deg, and squish again, you can usually deform the hole around the shaft and it'll loosen up and slide off. I've also heard of teams using nut splitters, but we ruined a nut splitter trying that, so I'm not so sure about that.