Thread: Salisbury diff housing failures

Just read this thread and had a little stress out about my Salisbury! My 130 is set up for remote touring and seeing reports and photo's of broken diff housings is a bit sobering. If not overloaded and with sensible driving I'm sure that the vast majority of heavy duty thicker 130 diff housings would be fine. The trouble is I wasn't sure which Salisbury I had under my 130 as the previous owner had sourced a second-hand one to gain rear disc brakes. I scratched around but stuffed if I could find any numbers, so I took the breather out and measured the tube thickness with a small bit of bent wire and black tape, and are happy to say it is about 8.7mm thick.

Still think it would be good to have some sort of external bracing. What would be wrong with making a gusset from the bump stop block welded to the tube and bolting to the diff pumpkin using the four mounting bolts for the A frame ball joint?

Easiest way would be to simply raise the ball joint block by the thickness of the diff brace, say 12mm, and use longer bolts. Would raising the ball joint cause any issues?
Cheers, Andrew.

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Originally Posted by 67hardtop

Have you also thought about an APT fabricators diff cover for extra strength and stability for the diff centre. They are heavy and strong as all hell. I have one on my s2a
It would also give you a strong point to maybe weld on those tabs you were talking about for bracing. Just a suggestion.

Cheers Rod

Hey mate

Thanks for the suggestion, I'm already running one of the ARB style cast rear covers

Originally Posted by steveG

Hey Jock - good to see you've got some Landy thinking time on your hands now

Just putting things in perspective:
- You were pretty damn heavy
- First housing had done a fair few K's
- Second I'm guessing was sourced locally up north so unknown history but likely had a hard time on the local roads?
- even landrover acknowledged that the 110 housing wasn't up to the HD 3500kg GVM - hence the
- 130 housing is a whole lot stronger in the tubes - increased wall from about 5mm to 8mm from memory.

While I haven't had to suffer the indignity of 2 truck trips from a broken Sals - thinking maybe you're going overboard on the strengthening plans and possibly creating other issues...

Don't recall if I've said it earlier in this thread, but to me the internal tube method feels more elegant than external bracing.
It also gives a laminated effect where a crack that starts in the main tube won't propagate directly through the brace tube, so as long as the internal tube is at least decently stitch welded at both ends to prevent it pulling out you should still have sufficient structure to get you home in the event that the main tube did crack.

Also, not sure what the options are for NDT on a housing (maybe only x-ray), but depending on what you know about the history of the donor 130 housing it may be worthwhile looking into to confirm you've got a sound housing to start with.

Steve

Valid points Steve, and yeah I am aware that the first two diffs were probably less than average condition wise. I also agree that I may be going overboard with my bracing; but it's only once you've experienced that weird floating sensation in back end of your car that you can fully appreciate ridiculous overkill.

Will brace it up when I get home and post up some photos

Interesting posts from Outback, with regard to thicknesses

While I was sitting on the side of the road a fella told me he had broken a Dana in his last F-250 as well, by the looks of his Cruiser is was probably just as overloaded as the rest of us