Please forgive me in advance for this.... Any so called 4wd vehicle with a normal open diff in front can't be 3 wheel
drive. It could be called 3 wheel spin- if it has a locked rear diff.. Here's what I mean. If a P500 has the rear tires on ice, and one front wheel on ice, and the other on pavement, the machine won't move, even though it has one front tire with good traction, because a non-traction enhanced, or open diff, will send all power to the tire with the
least traction, so yes, it has three wheels spinning, but none driving. With the P500, or any machine, that has an open front diff, and a locked rear, as soon as the machine gets in mush, or encounters an obstacle that either gets one front tire off the ground, or one front tire with good traction, and the other with no traction, you instantly have only
two wheel drive, because all the power going to the front is wasted on the tire with no traction. But if both front wheels have
equal traction you have true 4wd until one of those tires encounters a low traction condition again, and poof...2wd. And that's why we've all been squealing about no locking diff. This gets even better for all of us with so-called 4wd trucks, or whatever, cuz if you have open diffs in the front, and rear- which most do, and you happen to have say, two left side tires on ice, and the two right side tires on pavement, and you're trying to pull your trailer out of a snow-bank, you got 2wspin, and no movement cuz the open diffs are sending all your power to the tires with zero traction. Fortunately,
zero traction doesn't happen too often, but that trailer in the snow-bank thing happened to me many years ago, and I've never owned a truck since then without at least one diff with some sort of traction enhancing device installed.
Now back to the TORQ-Locker in my P5! Happy days! I was out riding today- it's been raining for days again. Had the Princess with me- we did some video clips I'll post later. Y'all are gonna be very surprised at how well the auto-locker works, I know I keep saying it, but each time I put the machine into different types of terrain, I'm just more amazed at the difference it's made. There's a really steep mound on part of the trail that I could always get over, but it would always lose traction coming over the top. Here's the thing, with the limited traction the machine had before, it always felt like 1st gear had unstoppable power, but now, it has so much more traction, it actually makes the engine grunt in 1st on those steep climbs or tough obstacles. When I was at Spearhead last wknd, I went through a mud hole that was deeper than anticipated, so I went into it at a moderate r.p.m. in 2nd and as it got deeper I kept pushing the throttle down, eventually pegged, and it dragged it down to the point I thought I would have no choice but to downshift, (stop) but it started to shallow up, and I drove through ok. The thing that keeps amazing me, is that auto-locker is as positive as a spool when you need it, but virtually unnoticeable when you don't! It defies all my preconceived expectations....
Y'all are gonna be sick of hearing about it- till ya get one installed
!! Gonna have to start a new thread so we can share our experiences with our new P500's
