Suspension upgrade advice

Very long reply 300! My experience of the ATB LSD is it improves traction and how the car drives in many situations well before traction control would intervene. The car handles better through corners and wheel slip is minimised on wet roads, gravel, mud, sand etc. I appreciate it's doing something different to traction control or a locked diff, and isn't a replacement for either of those. That is partly why I recommend one. It's a traction aid that assists all the time, doesn't need to be switched on and off and as far as my experience goes has no downsides. Diff locks are great on the rare occasion you need them, but no use whatsoever the rest of the time. Traction control helps to manage things once wheels start to slip, but doesn't alter the point at which that happens.

My sound deadening figure was based on what i had to do with my old subaru years ago using a product called Brown Bread that you were expected to cover virtually every surface of the shell with. It was extremely good but I used boxes of it!

The weight of the sound deadening does add up, I used a little less than half a box of 50mil Kilmat to cover the entire floor, front wheel tubs and transmission tunnel, as what I was looking to deal with was gear whine. - my estimate is just around 5kg.  How & where you install the sound deadening material is, or rather, should be, dictated by the desired end results, sometimes all you need is to stop a panel from resonating (say the outer door skin) and that can be done by applying a 15cm x 30cm piece, rather than covering the entire inside of the skin.

I'll be adding rear speakers to the three door in a couple of weeks and will most likely add some more of the Kilmat to the inside of the sheet metal, but it's not going to be a cover the entire shell deal.

I did this to mine. Limited places where you can really put the sound proofing. The foam style stuff is very lightweight. There was a bit more in the boot under the tray, but again you can't just put it everywhere.
 

 

I was planning on putting some more proofing under the seats, front footwells and tunnel. But at the time I couldn't be bothered to remove the seats and other trim to make this possible.

The biggest difference I've noticed with what I've done is it has reduced the water splash noise when driving on a wet road. But I really don't think it adds up to very much weight gain on the vehicle.

Busta wrote:

Very long reply 300! My experience of the ATB LSD is it improves traction and how the car drives in many situations well before traction control would intervene. The car handles better through corners and wheel slip is minimised on wet roads, gravel, mud, sand etc. I appreciate it's doing something different to traction control or a locked diff, and isn't a replacement for either of those. That is partly why I recommend one. It's a traction aid that assists all the time, doesn't need to be switched on and off and as far as my experience goes has no downsides. Diff locks are great on the rare occasion you need them, but no use whatsoever the rest of the time. Traction control helps to manage things once wheels start to slip, but doesn't alter the point at which that happens.

I'm certainly not knocking ATB diffs. I was just surprised with the results of some real world testing we did.

If you have open diffs and no traction control they will be a positive enhancement for sure. But if you are getting wheels in the air, they aren't quite the game changer I thought they'd be and required you to be a lot more brutal to make them work than I thought they would, even with wheels on the ground.

But if you have traction control, from the drivers seat in technical off road use, I personally couldn't tell if ATBs where present or not. It was the traction control that made the difference. So on a JB74 Gen 4, I think ATBs would offer very little "enhanced" capability over stock.