Thread: Do I have traction control and central locking?

Originally Posted by Casper

Doesn't matter though as if you really want to go in the tough stuff your more than likely to go get some diff locks, lift it up a bit, put some bigger bags under it etc any way, some of which will pretty much render the electronic aids irrelevant.

Nothing wrong with them if they are there but I personally don't know enough about a TC system to be able to retro fit it and would prefer a couple of grand cash and the nuts and bolts of a couple of ARB air lockers and a good compressor.

It's like road tyres, great for what they are made for but crap when the going gets rough so you get off road tyres.

Cheers Casper.

TC + LSDs (EG Truetrac) is at least 95% as good as lockers (ARB etc...).

The reason I was asking was if the vehicle had TC, then 2x TT LSDs is a simple and cheap way to make the vehicle much better.

Lifts and big wheels do not render TC irrelevant.

I prefer manual lockers, but TC certainly has its place. Sam/Strangerover proved in some of his comp vehicles that TC+LSD was easily a match for the ARB or Detroit locker crowd.

I have a 97 Discovery series 1, have just deregistered it and am starting to dismantle it. No offense to the disco lovers out there, but it is certainly no Rangie.
This car had central locking fitted but was not working when I bought it- here's what I discovered (pun intended);
All of the actuators except the one in the driver's door are just passive gear-driven gadgets with a small electric motor. The one in the driver's door is the master actuator. The master actuator has a bit of solid-state circuitry in it that acts as a timer, there are 2 little switches in it that sense position. When the master actuator is unlocked by the key, it trips one of the microswitches and sends current to all the other actuators so that they also unlock. The timer circuit cuts this current off after approximately 1 second. When the timer bit dies, the master actuator will continue to feed power to the other 4 actuators until all the smoke leaks out of them and they no longer move.
I was fortunate enough to have a few slave actuators lying around that had stripped gear teeth but good motors with the smoke still in them, so I just had to buy a working master actuator and repair the others. Aftermarket central locking is probably cheaper than buying a full set of 2nd hand genuine ones.