Locking Differential

[Joe Cannarozzi]

I used to pull double dump trailers in Mich. in the winter, 11 axles. When empty you have a 50000lb empty weight with litterally no weight on the drive tires, very bad. Carried 2 5gal pails at all times. Anytime your forced to stop on a grade your toast, used it many times.

[merle&louise]

Out of a bad situation comes some good: Thanks Joe, good post.

I am going to try to locate some wood ashes to bring to OSHKOSH. I understand that last year, MM did some landscaping on Dan the OSH dude's pasture. With my luck it will rain like the devil.

[lewpopp]

Hey, all you southern boys....Us northerners think "grits" are to be used in case you get stuck.

Lew

[garyde]

Hey Tuga, don't feel bad. A few years back I had a Monaco which I decided to drive onto a 5 acre property I have in Paso Robles, Calif. . Anyway, the Fire Dept. happened to open up a hydrant and the water drained down onto my make shift dirt road. I hit the wet spot going less than 5 miles an hour and sunk down to the axles in the front. It began craking all the fiberglass on the front end and to make matters worse I tried to back out and I broke off chunks of the front end. Anyway, within 3 hours of digging and pulling with a 4 wheel drive truck, we got it out thanks to my neighbors help. $14000.00 later, I had the Coach back. Now, I stay away from uncompacted areas. That goes for soft shoulders on Hwy's also.

[Jon Wehrenberg]

Wood ash or sand grit works great on hard packed snow or slippery surfaces. Tuga BURIED his wheels and if you northern boys want to think of an analogy, imagine your bus body hung up on wet heavy snow while the wheels spin down through that stuff. You can provide traction till the bovines arrive but what Tuga needed, and got by waiting was a hard surface capable of supporting the coach drive tires.

Tuga, all the differential does is allows the wheels to travel at different speeds so when going around turns you are not scrubbing one set of wheels. The downside to a differential is that it will supply power to the set of tires that has the least traction. Newell did a great job providing the differential lock so you could get traction to both, equally and simultaneously.

In some trucks you can lock the wheels side to side (as you did) and also you can lock both sets of drive axles.

[Just Plain Jeff]

PRIOR to burying one's wheels...if you are on wet grass, the best strategy is to raise your tag (thereby putting all the weight on the drive axle) and s-l-o-w-l-y move forward.

Then one can get to Jon's top speed of 22.5 mph on the interstate without any trouble at all.

Contrary to public belief, there are times to go fast, times to go slow.

[merle&louise]

Thanks for the explanation Jon, I looked at the "How Stuff Works.com" website that Dale posted and it explains how a locking differential works with pictures. You are right about "burying the wheels", I could see that I wasn't going to get out of the mud until the mud dried completely. I was just lucky that it stopped raining.

If I would have had to have a tow truck PULL ME OUT, I don't know where the chains could have been attached to. Newell doesn't provide a welded ring or anything that I could see that could be used to latch onto. Would it be safe to attach the chain to the axle? On my 1987 Newell there were 2 receiver hitches in the front that could be used for towing, this one doesn't have anything like that (I wish it did).

Gary, I am sooo lucky not to have had any damage to my coach. Man, that must have been some ordeal.

Jeff, I tried raising my tag axle. It really doesn't come off of the ground like some coaches I have seen. It only dumps the air (pre set @ 25#) and it doesn't seem like it does much good. It was difficult to feel when the wheels were spinning. I was alone when I got stuck and by the time I walked outside to check it out, that baby was buried. So I just decided to wait. Boy I hope I never have to go through that again.

[Jon Wehrenberg]

Tuga,

If you ever sense wheel spin when you are not on a hard surface (and the coach is not moving) the only safe thing to do is stop and shut it off until you know what you are dealing with.

Unlike a car where a little rocking may do the trick, a bus just has too much mass to even consider trying that unless you are confident you are not making matters worse.

If you are alone, and starting to bury it and want to get out without a tow, raise it up as high as it will go, try to get the wheels in question off the ground with a jack which needs to be adequately supported by boards, and try to place planks or boards under the wheel that is spinning. The key is to stop the thing from burying itself deeper.

Once at a PP rally in Colorado Springs we watched a guy spin his wheels in the soft mud until he got the coach chassis all the way down to the ground. The only way a tow truck could pull him back out was to secure itself some distance from the coach and at a slight angle to the coach. When the winch on the tow truck started pulling he was pulling the buried coach back and sideways simultaneously. He was literally plowing mud with the bottom of the bay doors. It hurt to watch that. Horsing a coach on a soft surface is guaranteed to create much bigger problems.

[merle&louise]

That's good advice Jon. Sunday morning after the ground dried up considerably, I did just what you suggested. I raised the body of the coach with the air bags to maximum height. I did this because there are 2 skid plates that are welded to the back frame and they were buried in the ground. I figured that they would hamper my efforts so I raised up the coach about 4 inches. It was just enough for them to clear.

Jacking up the coach like you suggested is a good idea. I carry about 8 or 9 oak blocks that are 6"x8"x18". They would have been perfect to use to jack it up with. I remember seeing a 20 ton bottle jack in one of your bays while we were in Santa Fe so I bought myself one a few months later and also bought the oak blocks. If this ever happens again, I'll be ready.

Thanks for the advice

[Loc]

Tuga,

Hope you and Karen had a great time in Destin.

I have had the fortune of getting my bus stuck twice. Both times at the same place (says something about my learning abilities) which is a campground at a ranch in the Texas Hill Country where we do some off roading. I didn't sink it to the axle, but got stuck because of slick mud and a lack of traction. The first time I used the winch on my Jeep to unstick it (I had to anchor the Jeep to another Jeep to keep it from just pulling the Jeep). The second time, I was able to pull the bus out with my Jeep which has lockers in the front and rear differentials. It would have made a great Jeep commerical. Prevost puts two nice rings under the front of the bus and two on the back of the bus for idiots like me. We were there this last weekend, and I thoroughly inspected the campground before driving the bus in given all the rain that we have seen in Texas. No problems this time.

Loc