At this time no... I understand your pain. I ran a Montero back in 96 and loved the little thing. Took it places that they were not intended to go. Ran into the same problems with suppliers. By nature I like to build my own stuff so I just adapted what I could. Built my own bumpers, rocker guards (after bending them to $&@# and back). Was even going to use the Starion Turbo system and convert to a solid front axle when the chance to buy an $800 CJ7 came along...
We deal mainly with Jeeps. We have a chance to replace a supplier in a national parts company and need to fill in some gaps in our current offering of hubs. This required that a new partner be found. This also gave us the chance to look into possible better designs that could be supplied at a very good price. The next gen. of hubs are more in line with the design used by Aisin. My goal is to also roll this design over into the Jeep market as well.
There are a few things that I wanted to see improved over our older hubs.
(1) the mounting body needed to be beefed up.
the current design has less meat if you will.
I broke two during my last outing. Both times the
mounting body expanded under load and allowed the
inner drive gear to spin and brake the case.
Grant you this was with a 360 V8 Dana 44 front axle
with a locker, 60:1 final drive ratio, and 35"
BFG Krawlers.
(2) replacement of plastic center turn knob. We have
had some fail. Not a lot but some.
The first gen. are good and I stand behind them but it's always good to keep improving and moving forward. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/cheers.gif" alt="" />
