[Fot] LSD diffs, survey results

[Alexandre Camoletti]

Amici!
Following my survey about LSD 3 weeks ago, I got at some point very confused
and was really hesitating hard between Quaife and Salisbury plate types:
I will drive the car on snow, and on the dry I tend to lift rear wheels
(live axle car), and go on sometimes uneven grip surfaces, so Salisbury more
appropriate on real roads.
But the Salisbury needs maintenance (coating on the clutches wears and need
replacement), heats a lot, and gets soon noisy.
So not great for a road car.
At that point I was really thinking of getting a Quaife: gear driven, no
maintenance, no noise. But spinning wheel lifted or on loose surface will
not lock. Plus the Quaife will try to counteract tail sliding, while the
Salisbury will help getting it smooth.
Price was not an issue as here in Europe they have approx. the same price.
At that point Keith Files (Kastner Cup winner 2010) came up with the Gripper
diff he has now on his TR6. The Gripper inventor was into the Jaguar
engineering racing team during the Le Mans years and he did a lot of
transmission development.
Keith tried it in his 207BHP TR6 at Silverstone and at the Nurburgring.
Performs brilliantly.
No noises (usually after an hour the Salisbury TranX gets noisy and clonks)
.
No need to rebuild so far (while with the traditional LSD a rebuild would be
needed after 3-4 hours already).
Progressive action also.
The Gripper is a refined design of the Salisbury plate type. The plates wear
very slowly as they are not coated, they just bead in each other. So no
noise coming in while the coatings wear. Replacement plates are very cheap
as they have no special coating (# 3 or so each).
Seems like the best of both worlds.
So I ordered a Gripper this morning to Simon, TR Enterprises, cost # 700
+tax (same as TranX traditional Salisbury type and Quaife gear LSD), Specs
40/65 ramp angles and 8 clutch plates fitted (instead a 12 for race track
use, which gives more locking, but one can just add the 4 plates to modify
the diff in full race form at any time).
Thank you very much to Keith, Kas, Teri Ann, Joe Curry, Bob Lang, Tony(both:
Drew+ Sheach), Chuck Arnold, Jim Gray and Joe Alexander for their very
informative and useful feedbacks.

Gripper website, with interesting tech drawings:
http://www.davemacprops.com/gripper.html

All the best!
Alex Camoletti