Fully adjustable plate-type LSD tutorial
 

EDIT: Requires all wheel drive

Well, the other day I had the idea to make an LSD that used plates (like many drift cars do). The advantage of this is that it's adjustable by tightening the three screws. I used the AWD ball differential, but I guess you could use one of the gear diffs with a little modification. This mod (if done with the ball diff), is fully reversable, if you don't like it.

The "plates" I used are three metal washers, you can see them in the pic below, here are the specifications:

-Width: 3/8"
-Thickness: 1/32"
-The interior diameter isn't very important, but it's 3/16"

I took out the middle peice of the diff, as well as the five ball bearings.

One of the most important steps is to use some good lubricant between all the plates. Otherwise it will be too tight, and will basicaly be a locked dif. I used this lubricant.

These are all the peices I used:

The great thing about this is that it's adjustable from as free as the ball diff, to locked. :D

You must turn all three screws the same amount.

As you can see from the pic all you have to do is take one wheel off to adjust it. :)

i like the idea...maybe you could put a piece of paper in between each one to act as a fricton disk...where did you get the washers from?

The washers have enough friction in between them, especially because you can increase the friction by tightening the screws.

The washers are just some that happend to be lying around, I was lucky that they were the exact width and thickness I needed.

cool idea

thats a good idea but what i did with mine is i left the balls in and just took the little mounts that the screws go into and shaved them down a bit and you get the same effect but if you want fwd then all you do is pull the one tire off and loosen them up and voila fwd or you can go almos as tight as locked it all depends on how much you shave down the little mounts

This is a good mod. http://www.tinyrc.com/forums/images/icons/icon14.gif

Coming from you that says a lot. Thanks. :)

I meant to upload this earlier, here is the diff installed.

not to kill the idea or anything but if you loosen the lsd enough wouldnt it slip and lose power instead of sending it to the wheels? i am running tamiya washers that are 1/4th inch in my stock gear diff with all the gears in. its fully adjustable. b4 when i ran it w/o the gears and the plates inverted the thing just slips:rolleyes:

heres the set up im running now. ive been messing with gear diffs for a while. ive never worked with a ball diff so i wouldnt know how it would work but thats a nice diff you have there;) all we need now is a fully adjustable suspension:D

Well, the reason I even have the ball differential is because I have the AWD kit :rolleyes:. When I loosen the diff. more power goes to the front wheels, reducing oversteer, and increasing understeer. When I tighten the diff. there is less slip between the back two wheels, which increases oversteer, and decreases understeer.

When tightening or loosening the diff. a very small amout will drasticaly change how the car handles. It takes a lot of experimenting to get the desiered amount of slip.

yeah it does take alot of adjusting to get that desired setting. hmm i c now how you set it up. kind of like a front biased all wheel drive. so ur rear diff is also doubling as a center differential sort of in a way as it adjusts power distribution between the front and rear. nice. i didnt think of that lol. im running rwd. GO 2WD GO!!:D

Yeah, just not that versitile. You aren't actualy giving the rear more torque, it oversteers more because the rear wheels are locked or almost locked, which is why it oversteers.

so what are ur suspension/tire/diff settings right now and on what kinda surface?