Gen 3 GDP Portal Gear Lifts are here, and they’re filled to the brim with new design features and options that make them better for everybody. Options are what Gen 3 portals are really all about. We wanted to make a portal that fits everybody’s riding style by giving you new gear reduction choices and housing material options. Plus, we made them stronger and better overall.
Enough gabbing, here’s everything new on SuperATV’s Gen 3 Portals.
The most profound difference between Gen 2 and Gen 3 portals are your gear reduction options. Let’s break it down:
Basically, our new smallest gear reduction at 15% on 4″ portals, and a smaller 6″ gear reduction at 30%. This rounds out the options for you guys so you can tune your portal to your specific riding style.
We do a ton of trail riding around here. A lot of people find that 32″ tires are the sweet spot for the kind of terrain we have — lots of creeks and hills with plenty of easy areas for flat-out speed. A 4″ portal with a 15% gear reduction is perfect for 32″ tires on that terrain. We get the big tires we want, we get our torque back from the 15% gear reduction, and we keep our top speed. The extra clearance from the lift and larger tires is the icing on the cake and makes our style of narrow, rocky, and steep creeks easy to ride on.
That’s just the way we ride around here. We’ve found that our 15% gear reduction hits the sweet spot for all sorts of riders that aren’t trying to go as big as possible. They’re great in the dunes where the extra torque makes climbing big hills easier and coming down again faster, and they’re awesome in the desert where there’s plenty of space to go fast and lots of technical rocks and hills to navigate through. In fact, you can make use of our 15% portal gear reduction in just about any application that doesn’t involve getting huge tires.
Go a little bigger with a 30% gear reduction and 4″ lift — it’s where portals started for a reason. It gives you more clearance and plenty of torque for a huge variety of terrains. That’s what Ross Pilgreen rode on to a 10th place finish at King of the Hammers 2018. The versatility of 4″ portals with a 30% gear reduction can’t be overstated. They’re great.
More options for 6″ portals mean more versatility as well. We’ve still got 45% gear reductions for those of you who like to gear way down and go big, but now we’ve also got a 30% gear reduction for those wanting smaller tires (like a modest 38″ tire) and lots of lift.
“No new gear reductions for the 8″ portals?” asked no one ever. Seriously, if you’re going that big with your portals, you’re going big with everything else. You need a 45% gear reduction.
In fact, we had to make 8″ portals extra-beefy right from the start. We seal the 8″ housing with an O-ring style rubber seal, and they’ve got all the other Gen 3 features we’re about to get into.
Not only do the gears come in different reductions, but they’ve also been totally overhauled structurally. We’ve updated the material to 9310 steel alloy. You could even say it’s billet. For reference, 9310 is the same material used on many aircraft engine gears. It’s very tough.
We also redesigned our drive gear for the 4” and 6” portals to match our design on the 8” portals. For the 98% of you that don’t know what that means, the drive gear now seals against the housing instead of your axle shaft. That means you can fill your portal with oil and it won’t leak even without an axle installed.
With Gen 2 and earlier models, we counted on a good sealing surface between the gear and the axle shaft to keep oil in. That was great… except for those of you who ran well-loved axles. Now your axle condition is a non-issue. The oil stays in whether your axle is brand new out of the box or an antique rusted thing discovered in the ruins of an ancient Ford factory.
The flashiest update to Gen 3 is the option to get billet aluminum housings. Billet housings have increased strength and feature a consistency of material better than cast. Cast aluminum can contain a small number of microscopic air pockets or impurities in any given casting. Manufacturing with billet ensures the purity of the material hence the strength increase.
Also, they look rad. Nobody ever looked at anything billet aluminum and thought “that doesn’t look cool.” We know they’re going to get covered in mud, dirt, and dust right away, but that just makes spraying them off that much more satisfying.
We made a couple smaller changes as well to improve your overall portal experience. We changed our idler bearing from a ball bearing to a roller bearing style. This is the bearing that carries the middle gear (the “idler” gear) and it boosts strength and longevity.
The last change I’ll mention is that our fill and drain plugs are now sealed with a rubber O-ring and are no longer NPT. They’re much easier to get sealed since you won’t have to break out the plumber’s tape.
Put everything together and you get the best, most versatile portal gear lift on the market. It’s stronger, and better performing than ever before, and it was already the premier portal gear lift on the market. Now portals are perfect for anybody’s riding style. We’re always changing and always improving. We’ll continue to make our products better and better. Keep your eyes on SuperATV, you never know what we’ve got coming just over the horizon.
