CATCRD wrote:
I would love to see the actual fracture surface of some of these broken diffs. Some people abuse theirs off road and never have a problem. Others break doing something mundane. I would suspect some kind of casting seam or porosity is contributing to the weakness in the pinion area in just a few diffs.
The major engineering flaw is the fact that the pinion bearing/shaft support area is so long compared to other IFS diffs. Meaning it has all the more leverage when in a bind to split that area open. If the Jeep engineers had forseen this, all it would take to fix the major flaw and increase carrier strength by at least 15% would have simply been to make the pinion gear shaft shorter and drive shaft longer. But with the buying market like it is and what they were going after, the people who control the money were more concerned with "NVH" (noise, vibration, harshness) than ultimate offroad reliability, hence the concession to IFS in the 1st place to increase on-road feel, smoothness, and driveability. Cause with a longer driveshaft, the ability to control vibrations becomes harder and more costly.
And to be truly honest, they hit a sales home run when the Liberty when on sale and to this day is still their single best selling vehicle, the vast majority of which rarely if ever even engage 4wd. What we use ours for makes up such a minority of KJ's/KK's that it's pure fantasy to think or want Jeep to cater to our needs.