Got tired of the slightly leaking trans so decided I would reseal all external connections I haven't touched. This included the intermediate adjustment band, shift shaft seal and kickdown lever o-ring, servo cover gasket and seal, and fill tube o-ring. I've had the rig down since January and saw weepage everywhere except the servo gasket, and that was hard to tell because of the dipstick o-ring and the hard line flare above it appears to be leaking too.
Anyway, removing the shift shaft seal was awful and nothing like the videos where it falls out using a wet noodle as a pick. I had to maul the rubber out of the way and carefully Dremel two reliefs in the case so it would collapse enough to be pried out. And in Ford's infinite wisdom the seal isn't accessible from inside the trans so you can't punch it out. But I got it out without tearing up anything else.
It was more challenging to reassemble the shift levers than expected - mainly due to the manual shift lever having a multi-detent piece that has to rest on a spring-loaded roller. There's too much flexibility for it all to just fall together, but after a reset and change in course, got it done. Biggest key is to ensure the 7/8" nut on the shift lever is free-running since you'll need to tighten that up by hand as soon as you get the internal shift lever keyed into the external lever's flats while holding the internal lever detent came on the roller. Learned that the hard way.
Still have to install valve body and button things up, and won't know for many more weeks if I screwed anything up. But I added a Fumoto valve on my TCI pan so, in the likely event I did, I can catch the fluid and reuse it. If all goes well, I'll eventually swap back to the magnetic plug since it actually did catch some fines.
No pics since I suck at pics. This job was more than I bargained for without trying to take pics.