You wouldn’t want broken studs in your hub on trail, which means that you did not have your 4 wheel drive. Thats bad, putting extra stress on your engine, differential and sometimes on your companion when they had to recover you in a hard trail.
With the introduction of chromoly shaft and heavy duty lockers , additional stress will be accumulated at the hub side. Commonly prone to damage are the studs, hub housing or the hub gear. We can upgrade the hub with chromoly hub gears, or lock it up with a flange, however the studs are still there to break.
We had been testing the Trail-Gear’s Studless Hub setup since mid 2015. It had been holding up very well. As the name says , there are no studs on the hub for you to break. Other than the bearings that comes with the kit, most of the other parts are cover under Trail-Gear’s Limited Lifetime Warranty.
Currently at the time of this post , the studless kit is only available for Toyota Pickup and 4Runner. But we installed it on a Toyota Landcruiser FJ80 Series with some minor modification. We also get the following items from Trail-Gear as well, Chromoly 4Runner/Pickup Spindle as well as the Chromoly Spindle nut.
The reason for getting the spindle is because the stock LC80 spindle are short and we are not able to tighten the spindle when the studless hub is installed. Another modification done is that the flange end of the spindle, the internal diameter of the the spindle barrel opening is wider than that of original LC80. Ring sleeves are added to the spindles for the birfield to fit tightly.
We replaced the stock links with the stronger, flexible 7075 alloy solid rods as they can bend to a certain degree and return to its straighten form unlike the other high tensile steel rod that doesn't have this characteristic. Using chromoly rod ends will give the suspension a larger degree of articulation and more durable as compared to the conventional rubber bushing joints.
Thats it , we have the studless hub on a Landcruiser. Like mention on the manufacturer website, the brake rotor and caliper might need to be replaced and you lose the ability to free your hub.
Check out our other post on how this Landcruiser 80 perform in our trail test.
http://singapore.4x4back2nature.com/2016/01/selancar-4x4-offroad.html
Where can I get the new spindle bushing???
ReplyDeleteYou can get it from Trail-gear
Delete