What is a Truck Differential?

November 20th, 2008 by Shenron

Truck Differential is a small but special type of gearbox, which is designed for splitting and delivering torque of your car’s engine into output allowing the wheels to move at dissimilar speed.

Truck differential is a special type of gearbox. It is designed for splitting and delivering the torque fed into the truck to the 2 outputs, which have the feature of turning at dissimilar speeds. Truck Differentials within axles have been designed for evenly splitting the torque. However, when differential is used in between the front & rear axles of particular systems, they are easily designed to apportion its torque unevenly.

How Truck Differential works?

There are 3 different jobs that are done by a truck differential:

It helps in aiming engine power of your truck at its wheels
It helps in acting as final gear reduction in your vehicle and slows the transmission’s rotational speed prior to the same hitting the wheels for one last time
It helps in transmitting the power to your trucks wheels, while permitting them to rotate at dissimilar speeds (This is the only reason why ‘Differential’ earned its name.)

You should be aware of the fact that your trucks need a differential. At the same time, you should also know the working of a truck differential and what are its shortcomings. Again, knowing the different types of positraction (also referred as limited slip differential) is also imperative.

Why Does Your Truck Require A Differential?

Wheels of your truck mostly run at dissimilar speeds, especially in case where they are taking a turn. As a result, each of the wheels should travel different distances during a turn. At the same time, the truck’s inside wheels travel shorter distances than its outside ones. Since, we know that speed is the ratio of distance travelled to time taken by it for covering the distance, the wheels travelling a shorter distance is bound to travel at lower speeds in comparison to the other one. You should also note the fact that your truck’s front wheel travels a dissimilar distances than its rear wheels.

For non-driven wheels on your truck: front wheels of a rear-wheel drive and back wheels of a front-wheel drive, truck differential can never be an issue. You cannot find any connection between the wheels and henceforth they are spinning independently. However, driven wheels of your truck are linked together. This allows a single engine & transmission for turning both the wheels of your truck.

If your truck did not have a truck differential, its wheels must be locked tight with one another and will be forced for spinning at similar speeds. This makes turning the truck pretty much difficult and at the same time, can be tough on your truck. If you want your truck to have the option of turning, one of its tires will require slipping. Since we are talking about modern tires in this case along with concrete roads, great force is very much necessary for making a tire slip.

This force will have to be transmitted through the axle from one wheel to another, and simultaneously, it’ll have to put heavy strains on its axle components.

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