Fred Williams
Brand Manager, Petersen’s 4Wheel & Off Road
The new DynaLoc hubs from Dynatrac use a 1/5-turn engagement and have hard anodized 6061 aluminum knobs and zinc-coated stainless steel caps. They are available for 30- and 35-spline Dana 60s with 40-spline versions coming soon.
Selectable locking hubs have been around for ages, and let's face it, they are a great invention. When you are on the street, you simply unlock them and the front wheels spin free of all the other parts inside the front axlehousing. This is so important these days because fewer spinning parts means better gas mileage and everything inside the axlehousing lasts longer. When when you hit the dirt and shift into four-wheel drive, power goes down the front driveshaft, through the ring-and-pinion/differential, and out the axleshafts, but you must engage your selectable hubs in order to connect the axleshaft to the wheel. This is also great because if you should break something in your axlehousing, you can unlock the hubs and drive home without all those expensive bits grinding and binding. But what happens if you break the hub itself? And worse yet, what if you break a hub right in the middle of a nasty off-road obstacle miles from civilization? That's when you'll be wishing you had a set of these new DynaLoc hubs from Dynatrac.
In case you've been sleeping for the past 10 years, Dynatrac has made a name for itself by building some of the best axles in the 4x4 aftermarket, especially in the Dana 60 realm. Though the folks at Dynatrac have been strong supporters of the other selectable hub manufacturers, they decided that building a cream-of-the-crop selectable hub was in their future. What Dynatrac has ended up with is not your basic off-the-shelf Warn, Spicer, Teraflex, MileMarker, Selectro, or Superwinch selectable hub, but rather a burly selectable hub that is designed specific to your axle. Plus they are engineered such that should an unlikely catastrophic failure occur, the hub will revert to a locked mode rather than the industry-common unlocked mode (thus you can keep driving through the rough stuff and then home rather than walking), and constructed of some top-of-the-line materials with hi-zoot coatings for additional strength and durability. Of course here is the rough part: Expect to pay just less than $500 for a set of these hubs. This may seem ridiculous, but in a time when the market is demanding chromoly axleshafts and 300M U-joints with monster price tags, we're sure that there are customers willing to drop the cash for what may be their last set of selectable hubs. Plus we need to mention that every last component of these hubs is made in the United States of America, something that is getting harder and harder to find these days. We're going to show you these super units inside and out right now and we'll revisit them in 12 months to tell you how they've been surviving.
