TOUGH TIMES TOUGHER DIFFS

THE HARSH AUSTRALIAN CONTINENT TAKES ITS TOLL ON EVEN THE MOST ROBUST 4WDS INCLUDING THE LC79, FOR WHICH IT'S TIME TO UPGRADE THE DRIVELINE. READ DIFFS, AXLES, BEARINGS, HOUSINGS AND MORE.

- RON MOON

THE 79 Cruiser has had a hard time over the last eight months, crossing the Simpson three times along the acclaimed Madigan Line, doing two Coast to Coast trips from Ceduna in South Australia to Pardoo Station on the Indian Ocean, and then completing two Cape York trips that not only saw the OTL track each time, but also the Starke River track, Frenchman’s Track and the Old Coach Road from Laura to Maytown.

In-between those jaunts were the intervening kilometres along gravel roads linking start and finish points, and while they weren’t difficult they still add to the wear and tear the vehicle is subject to. There would be few vehicles in Australia doing as many hard four-wheel drive kilometres as this rig. As you’d expect, such distances and the wear and tear of these tough iconic tracks comes at a price.

Once we started looking, the mechanical carnage was more dramatic than what we had first envisaged. One of the diff breathers had let go somewhere along the line and had let a slurry of water and mud into the rear diff, destroying axle bearings and the housing, allowing the bearing to spin inside the axle housing. There was so much carnage to the diff, axles and axle housing that we decided to bite the bullet and replace the whole lot with a Multidrive Technology heavy-duty diff housing that corrects the anomaly between the track width between front and rear axles. This engineer-approved mod includes dedicated longer heavy-duty axles with a GVM upgrade, if fitted with the properly approved spring pack. We opted for a Terrain Tamer parabolic spring pack which took the GVM up to 3780kg, while other TT spring packs can take your GVM up to 3950kg.