Forester 2001 - 4eat - Opinions on cusco lsd for the front?

cr445671

Forum Member
Joined
Jul 20, 2018
Messages
66
Location
florida
Car Year
2002
Car Model
forester
Transmission
auto
I'm mulling over getting a cusco lsd for the front, leaning towards 1 way, maybe 1.5 if y'all think it'd be better, what are y'alls opinions? This is mainly for offroad applications, but I am interested to hear how it would affect driving on the street too.

Also I know rear and center are higher priorities but since I've done the center diff lock mod and have the torq masters locker in the back those are both taken care of.
 
Cusco front clutch LSD, centre diff lock mod & TorqLocker rear diff is an excellent driveline!!
I'd probably go the 1 way set to 60% to keep the onroad handling good. I don't think there's any need for 1.5 way for the front. And 60% only has mild power on understeer. 80% is more noticeable and from what others have said, 100% is diabolical for the front lol
 
cool that's what I was hoping, reading around it seemed like there were mixed opinions about it when it came to the onroad stuff.

Now I just have to hope that the person who I've emailed with at primitive racing was right about being able to get me one for the automatic, she said she could but I was browsing the cusco catalog the other day and I sure didn't see one.
 
Yah I just heard back from primitive and apparently they got it wrong. don't know if I'd go through the trouble for a helical unit, as I understand it they don't do anything if one wheel completely loses traction e.g. wheel off the ground or more specifically for my intentions snow, which is the main thing I was thinking the clutch type may help with.
 
You really need to be careful with traction aides in the snow if they’re doing their thing automatically. You don’t want things kicking in suddenly causing a total loss of traction particularly in a sideways direction!

I’d leave that stuff to any sort of traction control system where there’s some form of monitoring going on.

As for the helical in the front diff, I love mine and it has very good road manners. I’ve noticed the difference offroad and typically when I’ve got a front wheel lifted the rear end is loaded up and gets me through. The only times that doesn’t work is if I get hung up diagonally, and in your case the torque locker will take care of that easy.

Cheers

Bennie
 
@El_Freddo
I've thought of that with the torq locker, especially with me being from florida and only driving in snow when on trips to the mountains; it's not exactly something I'm too experienced with. I don't figure there's much I can do about it though other than to just take it easy.

do you really think a helical front would make any difference when going up a snow covered forest service road? My interpertation of how they work led me to think that in the situation where one front wheel starts spinning after breaking free it wouldn't do anything since that's basically the same thing that's happening when one's off the ground, which is the thing everyone mentions as being there limitation. Is that not how they work?
 
My understanding of this diff is the spinning wheel needs to be on the ground for the worm gears to lock up. In the air there’s no torque/not enough torque being applied to the wheel to “tighten up” the LSD and apply torque to the other wheel with traction.

Cheers

Bennie
 
El_Freddo said:
My understanding of this diff is the spinning wheel needs to be on the ground for the worm gears to lock up. In the air there’s no torque/not enough torque being applied to the wheel to “tighten up” the LSD and apply torque to the other wheel with traction.

Cheers

Bennie
Click to expand...
ok yah, I went and watched a few youtube vids explaining 'em and apparently as opposed to a clutch style that has a set percentage lock up these opperate with a pre-set and non-adjustable "torque bias ratio". So the wheel with lost traction can transfer a set multiplier of the torque required to turn it to the wheel with traction, which is why one in the air doesn't work cause it effectively takes no torque to make it turn; if your ratio is say 4:1, 4x0 still equals 0.

Concerning my reasons for looking at one I'm guessing that means help with snow but not so much on ice. Judging by your avatar if you say yours makes a difference offroad I'm hoping that's a good sign, though I don't know how often you head to the mountains in winter. I don't know what I'd be getting myself into that I'd really need it other than that specific scenario, most things I drive aren't exactly that bad. Do you feel like it helps you when the snow starts getting deeper?
 
@cr445671 - the type of snow we get here can’t be compared to that of other countries that live with it in their daily lives. Our snow here is a choice to be in since it’s in our “mountains” (hills by other country’s height standard!) and only over a very very small area of our huge continent.

So I’ve not really had much experience with my front LSD in the snow. In wet conditions it’s awesome with AWD. Could be a different story with front wheel drive only.

With my current setup of front helical and open rear I wouldn’t hesitate to head to the snow. But if I had the torque locker in the rear I’d be much more dubious/cautious - if the free wheeling wheel can’t over come the spring pressure of the dog-like clutch because the surface traction is low, you could induce a slide as the rear wheels will continue to rotate as the same speed around corners.

The real problem with snow driving is that conditions can change with each metre travelled and certainly when rounding a bend with any sort of wind turbulence - eg, hill or road protective barrier, groups of trees or low bushes - where snow can collect smiilar to debris in an Eddie in a river. Ice is the real concern.

If you’re going to do loads of snow driving, tyres that are built specifically for snow conditions make a HUGE difference. I had a set while living in the Hotham area for two years, chalk and cheese compared to regular road tyres. But as the season warmed up I needed road tyres again as the snow tyres would get too hot and lost traction in corners. If I lived in the snow like that again, I’d get a good set of snow tyres.

Snow 4wdn isn’t a great deal of fun if you don’t know the track - snow hides logs, rocks holes and even small creeks at times. You’ll definitely want the rear locker and front LSD in this situation. What I spoke about above (before 4wdn talk) is for daily/semi daily snow driving on bitumen at higher than 4wdn speeds but much lower than regular highway speeds.

My last set of snow tyres (decade ago) were the Hancock iPikes. I still have them and they were last used in my brumby two or three years ago, they were nice and hard by then. Only good for the paddock now.

At about the five min mark has some snow driving/larking:


And our 2010 Hotham season that shows some of the different snow driving conditions with my totally awesome rad DIgarage band sound track:


I got side tracked, but thought it relevant too.

Cheers

Bennie
 
@El_Freddo - Yah everything I've heard about auto-lockers and street driving in winter has definitely got my ears perked up, I'm excited for it off road though.

Hopefully this plan of me getting one ends up working out, seems like it's about the only left I could do to add to my drivetrain and it'd be cool to have it maxed out so to speak. I got ahold of subaru gears and they've got a batch of 4eat ones in the works now with an eta of november, too bad it isn't sooner, maybe I'll luck out in the meantime and find one of the modena units that made their way to the states years ago.
 
Kevin said:
^ that's the season I was there and met @El_Freddo - it was an awesome week, I really enjoyed Mt Hotham.
Click to expand...
Geez that was a while ago! I don’t recall specifically when we met Kevin (which sucks because meeting Subaru people is usually something I remember well). There’s so many names of people in that video that I no longer remember but I spent a lot of time working and skiing with - it’s really sad - hopefully it’s not early Alzheimer’s... it’s concerning because my paternal grandmother had it. It’s not fun for the loved ones.

November is a bit of a wait! I guess that’s how many things are at the moment though. We might start to see a shift from buying off the shelf to order only - just means one will have to be more savvy in shopping for the right product and having the foresight to buy ahead of when it’s actually needed.

Cheers

Bennie
 
You can't beat a helical (or two) on snow but it would be nice to be able to lock them when hard offroading. Still haven't installed/developped a traction control yet....
 
@jf1sf5 , yah I'm hoping putting one up front will really make a difference getting up snowed over national forest roads, good to hear from a place that gets lots of it they do well. @NachaLuva , thanks for the heads up, I never would've found those guys otherwise.
 
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