Vince discovered that his Ferret had lost drive
to one wheel station and upon pulling down the hub discovered the
following mess.
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This is the wheel hub. In a Ferret it has a series of planetary gears in its centre which acts as a further gear reduction for the drivetrain. You can see the outer ring gear.
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This is the inner hub. You can just see the teeth of the gears which mesh into the ring gear of the outer hub. There are more gears that mesh with the spindle in the centre. The red markings are pointing to damage to the locating holes where the inner hub attaches to the spindle housing.
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Here are the remains of the connecting bolts and locating pins. Pretty mangled heh?
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The hub from the back side. Vince has notated where someone has glued in a replacement oil seal which doesn't seem to be a tight fit.
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The spindle housing and its damaged holes.
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The spindle in its fully extended position.
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The spindle fully retracted (just a range of movement not related to any problem here). The answer to Vince's question (in red) is "no", what he is looking at is scoring.
It is hard to say what went wrong here. I would guess that it is either a case of overload failure due to terrain reasons (eg., high load when climbing and loss of traction to the other wheels) which could have even occured long before Vince bought it, but not let go until later.
Or faulty assembly.
Whatever happened, the failure does not appear to be from a sudden impact due to faulty driving or an accident.
Thanks to Vince for the article.
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