TOPIC:

Hey guys, in the quest for not locking my crawler front diffs and losing all my turning radius, I've been messing around with converting the front bevel gear diff into a LSD (limited slip diff).

To do this I started with these:




2 o rings that fit snuggly over the outer bevel gears/splines:






I greased the o rings very well before I installed them, as well as the casings:




Then I simply filled the diff with think grease (automotive bearing grease) and rebuilt the diff according to the manual.

Now you have a diff that won't leak any grease, and it is stiff enough to remain "locked" until the wheel gets in a bind, or you turn on tarmac.

Hope this was interesting...

I read the title & was gonna say "Thick grease will give you that effect", but now see you've already figured that & are improving the method! One suggestion - use thick grade silicone grease rather than automotive bearing grease - silicone grease is naturally 'sticky' (Highly viscous) & won't go for the plastic (Automotive greases are petroleum based, ie solvents, & will degrade the plastic in time). The nature of silicone oils & greases are why they're used in damping mechanisms eg toy car shocks.
Great idea with the O-rings by the way!

The grease I use has the main ingredient found in the Tamiya grease, Molybdenum. Also it is silicone based.

Cool! I wonder if that's something else that's changed over the years that I've missed (Re: WD40). The moly just helps make the grease more slippery, a bit like graphite, & at the same time it's good at sticking to the components through electrostic attraction. It's also what gives that type of grease its black(ish) colour, pure silicone grease is usually transluscent white

That LSD is trippin'!

eddrick wrote:

I read the title & was gonna say "Thick grease will give you that effect"...

Ditto


On a similar note, you can non-permanently lock diffs by taking them apart, not cleaning all the grease off, applying a small bead of epoxy resin, reassemble & wait for it to set ... if you ever want to unlock the diff again, dismantle it & ping the locking "ring" off

Jonny wrote:

eddrick wrote:

I read the title & was gonna say "Thick grease will give you that effect"...

Ditto


On a similar note, you can non-permanently lock diffs by taking them apart, not cleaning all the grease off, applying a small bead of epoxy resin, reassemble & wait for it to set ... if you ever want to unlock the diff again, dismantle it & ping the locking "ring" off

The point of making a LSD was, I didn't want to lock the diff. In my old Pajero, I locked the diff, and that proved quite terrible when trying to negotiate the tight corners of most trails. Hence why I tried just shoving grease in the bevel gear diff, but after a couple of runs, the grease starts leaking out and the diff loosens up again, making crawling difficult (front wheels spins).

In the end, I just shoved hot glue in the diff with the grease still inside like you said JR, that way I could just remove it when I wanted to.

This is of course the other way to lock the diff:




OPEN




LOCKED

By adding extra bevel gears, you can safely lock the diff

Go mental, come up with a remote difflock! (Mod I did to my TXT, apologies for the awful pic!)