Changing 4wd wheel hubs cancelled insurance!

dacouch

iltisman wrote: »

I often wonder when I see cars that young people have modified (headlights, dropped suspension etc) whether they have invalidated their insurance which probably cost as much as the car.

Or more likely their parents insurance

Iceweasel

Din85 wrote: »

What a joke !

I run a car with a different engine entirely to the one it used to have... my insurance company was great, just asked what the engine came from, i told them, and they gave me the same price i had been paying before as the engine was the same, but chassis was different !

All it says on my insurance certificate is non standard engine lol.

Seriously, i would not have bothered telling them about 4wd hubs, it doesnt effect the vehicles performance in any way.

The post about brake pads is even more laughable, its just a different brand of pad for christs sake !

I'm not so sure that this is an unimportant modification which wouldn't effect performance.

Doesn't fitting manual hubs mean that you have to stop the vehicle and get out to engage/disengage four wheel drive fully.

Performance off-road and in snow and ice conditions would surely be effected by that.

Weird_Nev

Iceweasel wrote: »

Performance off-road and in snow and ice conditions would surely be effected by that.

Not really.

Manual locking hubs are often preferrred to auto locking hubs, because auto locking hubs can unlock if 'run backwards' - they rely on forwards drive from the axle to keep them locked. If you start a steep descent, where the front wheels actually turn faster than the axle, then the front auto hubs can unlock, leaving you in 2WD when you REALLY need 4WD braking the car down the hill.

It sounds like the OP's car may have had pneumatically actuated hubs in it though, and the manual hubs were just a solution to a failure of that system.

However, it's a driveline modification and insurers HATE that.

facade

By convention with us 4wd people, a manual locking hub is what it says: you get out and manually lock it by turning something on the hub, and it stays positively locked until you get out again and turn something the other way.

Auto locking hubs strictly are the ones you refer to, where some sort of roller & cam inside lock them when the front axle starts to drive, and you get them unlocked by engaging 2wd and reversing a short distance. They do stay engaged when going downhill, I had them on my old Terrano and I never crashed it on a descent, which would have happened if the fronts ran free and the braking came solely from the back.

However the pneumatically actuated ones, as the OP originally had, and I have on my little suzuki are sometimes referred to as "automatic locking". They positively lock when 4wd is engaged, and unlock when it is disengaged, operated by a controller that works vacuum valves in response to the transfer gearbox position.
They often give trouble due to corrosion of the steel pipework, and wear in the wheelbearing seals, and are quite often converted to the manually operated type.

BorderCollie_2

Doesn't fitting manual hubs mean that you have to stop the vehicle and get out to engage/disengage four wheel drive fully.

Performance off-road and in snow and ice conditions would surely be effected by that.

Don't know if you realise that with the original vacuum hubs, 4WD also couldn't be engaged unless my car was fully stopped first.

With the new manual hubs, as long as I leave the new hubs in the 'LOCK' position, I can switch from 2WD to full 4WD at 5mph or under, without having to get out of the car or stop completely, so it's actually safer in snow or icy conditions. Without switching the gearstick setting from 2WD to 4WD, the car stays in 2WD even though the hubs are in the locked position.

Iceweasel

BorderCollie wrote: »

Don't know if you realise that with the original vacuum hubs, 4WD also couldn't be engaged unless my car was fully stopped first.

With the new manual hubs, as long as I leave the new hubs in the 'LOCK' position, I can switch from 2WD to full 4WD at 5mph or under, without having to get out of the car or stop completely, so it's actually safer in snow or icy conditions. Without switching the gearstick setting from 2WD to 4WD, the car stays in 2WD even though the hubs are in the locked position.

So it looks like you have actually improved the vehicle and made it safer if anything - which is good.

What is not good is your old insurance company are a bunch of a***holes.

I feel you should have been told that they didn't cover such mods and you then had the opportunity to terminate the policy yourself, rather than them unilaterally cancel it.

I sincerely hope that you don't have difficulty with this in the future.

Good luck and 'keep it between the ditches'.

Strider590

Meh...

"I didn't know the car was modified, must have been the previous owner"

Weird_Nev

BorderCollie wrote: »

Don't know if you realise that with the original vacuum hubs, 4WD also couldn't be engaged unless my car was fully stopped first.

With the new manual hubs, as long as I leave the new hubs in the 'LOCK' position, I can switch from 2WD to full 4WD at 5mph or under, without having to get out of the car or stop completely, so it's actually safer in snow or icy conditions. Without switching the gearstick setting from 2WD to 4WD, the car stays in 2WD even though the hubs are in the locked position.

The recommendation is that you leave the front hubs locked even if you rarely use the vehicle in 4WD. The increase in fuel consumption is negligible - you're just accelerating the ront driveshafts and diff when you don't need to.

However, the benefits are that by rotating those parts, you keep them effectively lubricated. Also, if you don't often use the hubs they can seize, making it impossible to engage 4WD when you really need it.

So the locking hubs can safely be left locked, whether in 4WD or 2WD mode. Their only advantage when unlocked is fuel consumption, and the effect of that is too small to notice/measure.