I had the Warn set (P/N 34581) and the Superwinch(P/N 97-17105) set. Superwinch is what I preferred - ease of install,
can get readily, and lifetime replacement warrantied. I tried to
install the Warns, but had trouble adding the lockout cap into it's
housing. There is an alignment pin to align, however, the trouble I
had was with the finger gear teeth of the lockout. I tried several
different ways to get it to work. I even removed the housing to do
a 'bench' install and still had troubles. I could not get the lockout
finger gear teeth to align with the housing cavity. So I tried to
turn the lockout to align the teeth within the housing cavity as I
locked down the lock out cap, then heard cracking. The cap's housing
is plastic chrome!!! I removed the cap and noticed that some teeth
were bent!!! All this from hand tightening on the bench table. Pics
are in the folder. Install takes basically 4 steps: unbolt the 6 10mm
bolts, remove drive flange, bolt on lockout housing, add lockout cap.
You're done!!! I removed the wheel so that I could tap the drive
flange with a ball-peen hammer to remove it.
Do take note: in comparison, Superwinch had the gasket for Suzuki's
machined hub surface face, Warn had one for their 2-pce lockout.
Superwinch's lockout cap is sealed on their own lockout housing. The
stock drive flanges have a light, very light sealant coating. There
is also an o-ring groove which I found after cleaning the drive
flanges but no o-ring. I'm keeping the drive flanges in the XL-7
as 'trail spares' or later use to convert rear axle to full-floating.
One of the pics shows a close-up of the hub bearing. It's a ball
bearing setup with lockdown nuts. The hold on nut is an alignment
bolt which is screwed in by 3 phillips head machined screw to the nut
underneath it. All this is secured by a snap ring.
(Hopefully the pics shows up. Well, I've tried, but there are no pics which showed up. I pasted the url between the '[img]' but nothing came through. Pics are located in Jagular folder under XL-7 yahoo group.)
