90 Diffs

[BogMonster]

I am getting sick of the diffs in my 90

All the new Land Rover 2 pin diffs are rubbish. The tolerances they have nowadays in making the planetary gears, pin and cage, are sh&te, no other way of putting it. Basically what happens is that everything is too slack and flaps around, so when you put a load on the diff the planetary gears actually twist slightly inside their cage - you can just about see it if you peer through the oil filler hole - so the end result is that you get backlash in the diff, and it makes horrible noises - mine makes a metallic "clink" each time you change from a forward gear to reverse - or vice versa - as the gears twist up (its really loud - somebody said to me the other day "what the hell was that!"). It's not a one off either - it happens on quite a few newish vehicles and my Discovery (which has the same sort of diffs) has the same "clink disease" when changing from Drive to Reverse and giving it a bit of throttle.

So - I was wondering if you can get shims to go between the planetary gears and the cage to tighten up the tolerances of this whole unit? I haven't taken the diff out - no point as I know what the problem is already - but it seems to me that if you could reduce the slack in those gears then the problem would go away. It didn't used to be a problem on older vehicles (my old 90 had really tight diffs in even when I sold it with 77k on the clock).

Obviously one solution would be to fit different diff centres like ARBs which might be better made to tighter tolerances (never looked at an ARB with this in mind) which may happen in the future anyway, but its a lot of money to fix something that shouldn't be rocket science to sort out - anybody tried it? Somebody once told me a long time ago that the old Series diffs had some sort of fibre thrust washer between the gears and the cage, does anybody know if this would fit in a 90 diff? would it do the job? any other ideas for sorting this problem out?

Between that and the noises my friggin gearbox/transfer box makes I am starting to wish I'd kept the old 90 and spent the six grand on tarting up the bodywork and interior of that so much for buying a new vehicle so things would stop being wrong with it

Hoping Mr Ashcroft will appear in particular what do you do to "recon" ones Dave?

[Paul]

Of course, if you fit a Maxidrive locker, then you'll have a 4 pin centre, no backlash trouble, and a warm inner glow everytime the little switch goes ktsssch.

Go-on Steve, you know you want to.

Paul