Re: Locking Hubs

[n9ads@domain.elided (Howard R Pletcher)]

On Mon, 19 Jan 1998 20:23:42 -0500 cookiedan@domain.elided (Daniel Nees)
writes:
>Howard,
> I know we talked about this last month but my keyboard was swimming
>in ginger ale at the time and I finnally got a replacement. The Scouts
>had three types of hubs. The manual Warn hub, the automatic Warn hub,
>and a dualmatic hub. I know what the manual and auto do and have one 
>of each, but I don't know what the dualmatic does and I have a set of 
>them as well. Are they mearly a locking hub or do they operate like a
auto
>hub also?
>
In the mid-70's, IH was looking for ways to take cost of the the Scout
and the Warn Hubs, while good, were not cheap.  IH tested a number of
other brands and ended up making the Dualmatic the baseline manual hub
with the Warns still available as options.  My feeling is that most
people elected to use the Warn hub for the additional cost because of the
name.  

The Dualmatic is strictly a manual hub despite the "matic" in its name
and the design does not appear to be as strong as the Warn, although I
think it is adequate for average 4WD use.  I ran a set for a time with no
problems, but wanted my Lockomatics back.  The big knob of the Dualmatic
certainly makes turning them less of a problem.

The only automatic hubs that I knew of besides the Warns were made by
Cutlass and I'm not sure if they were in production or just prototypes. 
I know of someone that tested a set of these, but he had a number of
problems with them and they soon disappeared.   If I remember correctly,
these had only the Sprague clutch design of the Lockomatics and used a
small cam to try to lock the rollers into engagement for a manual mode.

Howard Pletcher
Howteron Products Scout Parts