Which works best in a lightweight 7 ?

The ATB gear lsd or a plate type ?

I will be fitting an ATB soon, I believe the Sierra Viscous LSD is quite soft in it's action, the plate LSD such as TransX need setting up to your spec, street or track.
The ATB should be smoother in action and does not lock, there is a strange action that happens if one wheel is on ice, no forward drive, applying a little bit of handbrake or a dab on the brakes adds friction causing the drive to go to the wheel with grip and away you go, not experienced that one yet.

Hi

The general consensus of opinion seems to be that a plate diff, if properly set-up to suit the car will be slightly better, depending if the conditions are right to suit the set-up that is..
But an ATB is nearly as good as a perfect plate diff all of the time, rain or shine, loaded or just driver etc.

I like the quaife, but the bloke i bought it off was fitting a Tran-X....

Al

Plate. Caterham spec Tran-X is available off the shelf from Rally Design. Much better than an ATB. I have driven cars with both...

I also have a set of modded shafts and snap rings somewhere to convert the tranx to bolt on shafts....

Hi Jon

The plate is by far the better choice for outright performance But. It needs the right setup and it may introduce a bit of under steer which can be dealt with via a bit of a suspension Geo setup. the down side is that it will need to have rebuild to reset the preload's once a year maybe.
The ATB offers pretty much the same performance if being used for just a bit of fun and track day use and is less prone to promote under steer.The main reason why so many of the RGB drivers use the ATB setup for circuit use as opposed to the plate being used more so for spring and hill climb where getting off the line counts more so. The only one thing that needs to be sorted is droop travel and damper valving on the rear to ensure that the inside rear tyre is not light loaded during cornering as the ATb reverts back to being an open diff as such.

Are you still running live axle setup or independent these days. ?

Cheers Matt

I guess you are using a 7" diff but if you are using a 7.5" then you can do what I did and get an Eaton Detroit TrueTrac from the States. They are basically a copy of the Quaife and it cost me £254 instead of the £750 for the Quaife ATB. I was so please with the price I ordered a plated one to try as well and have as a spare diff.
The Eaton range are available here
http://www.mc2racing.com/products/xr4ti/driveline/differentials/index.html

[Edited on 8/3/11 by atomic]