A mechanic told me my driver's side cv boot was in bad shape and I needed to replace it (and indeed when I took it home and jacked it up, it was completely shredded with grease sprayed everywhere).

I have an '05 cooper S R53 from the RE33 production (2004-08-02) with the 6-speed manual transmission.

I initially bought a duralast gold axle from autozone that seemed upon visual inspection to be a good fit, I replaced it (after about one billion hours of trying to separate the ball joint and the tie rod, it's lived it's whole life in new england and everything's all rusty).
Drove it about 2 miles and the axle suddenly disengaged from the transmission. After getting it home the end of the new axle in the transmission was all chewed up, we think that the c-clip didn't engage with the transmission properly to hold it in.

I ordered a reman off amazon (cardone 60-9279) in hopes that the fit would be better, but when I put the OEM and the reman side-by-side, the splines on the transmission end were wrong


Reman left, OEM right



Reman top, OEM bottom


I'm guessing that the reman won't work?

after I saw the part is wrong, I looked up on the cardone website to see what they said about their parts, and they list the following remans:

60-9279 Front Left w/M.T. and Supercharged [the current reman I have]
60-9612 Front Left w/M.T. and Exc. Supercharged

and I'm sort of baffled as to what "Exc." stands for. After looking at the pics of the transmission end, the second part looks more similar to the OEM on my vehicle, but I guess I was wondering if anyone knows about subtle differences/options that this refers to. My model is post-facelift but pre-LSD. Any experience with Cardone axles? I'm planning on returning the part to the seller on Amazon, but I don't want to buy another part that is "supposed" to fit my vehicle but doesn't.

 

Moving you to the Stock Problems/Issues section.

 

To OP. The reman'ed axles you bought from Amazon clearly has wrong splines. My wager is they got the R53/R52 ones swapped with the R50 as the 6 speed Getrag and 5 speed Midland MT has different splines. "Exc" must stand for exclude. You must have received the axles for the Midland 5 speed which gears made of cheese.

I've seen generic vendors frequently improperly list the right vehicles the part is for.

 

Yes, "exc" = excludes and it does appear you got the MT CV.

Have to watch parts on a R52 as the model has both supercharged and non-supercharged. It gets to the point for me that I use the r53 to search most parts for my R52S. Where it gets even more screwy is I have an 07 so the brakes and wheel lugs are different than the 06.

If you have the original, measure how long the "turned" shiny shaft is. By the picture the right one is shorter than the left.