Originally Posted by
AK83
Trying to get my head around a real world situation as described here:
that is for the rears to have to rotate at 10k/h, and therefore force the unloaded front wheel to rotate at 10k/h, the implication here is that both rear wheels are spinning at 10k/h(obvious I know).
But in what situation would you find that the rears are spinning at 10k/h and the car not moving forward by any amount?
For the front ATB to stop working in such a situation would imply that both rear wheels are off the ground and spinning at 10k/h AND the car is not moving forward. ie. you're hung up on the chassis with the air under both rear wheels.
That's a fairly extreme off road situation!
As long as some momentum is maintained, and there is a small amount of load on both of the ATB driven wheels, it doesn't actually spin. As it tries too the other wheel takes up the torque immediately.
The term spin with an ATB is referring to the relative spin .. that is how much spin one wheel has relative to the other on the ATB driven axle .. it's not actually spin.
So back to the situation described above:
If the rears are in the air, and one of the front wheels needs to spin at 10k/h, that also means that this front wheel has to also be in the air for it to actually spin.
If you have three wheels in the air, CDL locked, using full lockers on both axles, and only one wheel capable of driving the vehicle, you then have all the torque of the engine driving that one front wheel.
The two scenarios most likely to occur are that the wheel with grip will most likely spin as it probably hasn't got enough friction to pull the 2T weight of the vehicle, or if it did, you most likely break an axle or CV having all the tractive effort on just that one wheel trying to pull the vehicle out.
Either way that's some pretty extreme off roading.