[Joe Johnson]

Failure modes matter. Is it a shaft bending, teeth shearing off, etc.

It is hard to know from your description what happened. The gears teeth may have been a secondary failure.

But... ...once you know how it fails you can estimate at what value it will break.

It is probably outside the scope of a ChiefDelphi.com thread to cover the HOWs of these estimates. But perhaps we can give it a shot once we know more about what failure we are trying to predict.

Joe J.