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Our Complete Differentials Upgrade Everything

By Kavan Wright | Behind The Wheel on August 12, 2020
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Why is it so hard to find complete aftermarket differentials? It takes a ton of hard work and precision design to get it right. We put in the work and now we’ve got differentials that you can literally just swap with your OEM differential and get riding.

Getting a whole UTV differential instead of buying the parts piecemeal makes a lot of sense for a couple reasons. First of all, you almost never have a single part fail in a Polaris differential. If a sprague or gear fails, there’s usually a nice chain reaction that takes out a bunch of other internal parts and cracks the housing.

Secondly, buying a complete package is way better than buying components separately and trying to patch up your destroyed stock diff. It’s a two step process: Throw your blown stock diff in the scrap pile and bolt on a complete differential. It’s better than digging out all the broken parts, replacing them one by one, and then reinstalling.

Now why should you get a complete aftermarket differential from us? That’s what we’re here to talk about.

We Upgraded Everything!

We’re hardly ever making anything that’s simply a stock replacement, and for our Polaris front differential, nothing went untouched.

Stronger Housing

Let’s start with the part that holds everything together: the housing. Our diff housing comes in two different flavors—you can get cast or billet aluminum. Both housings have more material around the pinion tube and around the mounting holes. The billet housing also has threaded steel inserts to keep the mounting bolts even more secure. We’ve seen plenty of stock diffs break in these spots so we decided to make one that doesn’t.

Polaris RZR Differential Case
The optional billet aluminum housing is more than just good looking, it’s significantly stronger than cast, too. It packs in more material around the pinion shaft and mounting holes just like our cast housing, but it also makes use of steel helical inserts to keep the mounting bolts secure for the lifetime of your machine.
Photo by SuperATV

That’s not all we tweaked though. The pinion tube is secured with a bolt-on cap. With stock, dismantling your diff forces you to destroy the seal that holds in the pinion gear. Every time you would clean out a differential, you’d have to destroy and replace that seal. With our cap, you don’t destroy the seal—it’s a simple matter of unbolting the cap and bolting it back on when you’re done. It makes front differential service easy.

Better Sprague Carrier and Armature Plate

The sprague carrier and armature plate are classic stock Polaris weak spots. They’re at the center of the mechanism that makes the front differential engage and disengage. Unfortunately, the stock sprague tends to crack on many Polaris models (some are even made of plastic) and the stock armature plate can get pretty bent out of shape, too.

We made sure to make our sprague stronger with 7075 hardened aluminum and a patented spring design. They’re also backed by a lifetime warranty because we’re so confident in them.

Our heavy-duty armature plate is made with chromoly steel and uses double the number of teeth as stock. The extra teeth help share the load so that each individual tooth works only half as hard. The more teeth, the less likely they are to bend.

Altogether, this is one solid pair that keeps our differential in one piece.

Polaris RZR Armature Plate
Look at all of the teeth on that armature plate! Double the teeth means half the load on each tooth compared to stock. That makes for a long-lasting armature plate that won’t let you down. Did we mention that they’re made of chromoly steel?
Photo by SuperATV

Ring and Pinion Gear

What improvements could we make to the ring and pinion you ask? The stock gears are pretty solid but they have a big defect—they don’t mesh perfectly. Sure they’re fine, but there was room for improvement. Naturally, we made them better. What better meshing really means is that a bigger surface area of each tooth on the pinion gear is in contact with each tooth on the ring gear. More contact means they won’t wear in an awkward way and they’re less likely to chip. It’s like holding hands with your whole palm rather than just your fingertips.

Stock Let You Down

If you’re looking at these improvements and thinking “a stock differential is good enough,” allow us to state the obvious: your stock differential already broke. Don’t replace it with the exact same thing you broke! Otherwise, you’ll break it again! It wasn’t a fluke—these machines get pushed harder than almost any other vehicle on the planet. You need a differential that’s more than “good enough.”

We Don’t Charge a Premium

Our upgraded front differential for Polaris machines costs less than buying an OEM replacement. That’s right, with a cast housing and beefed up parts, you’ll end up spending roughly $400 less with us. You get a brand new differential with proven performance that will run on your machine for as long as you own it. We have complete differentials for the Polaris RZR, the Polaris Ranger, and the Polaris ACE. And we cover most of those models, too. Whether you need a RZR 800 differential, a Ranger 900 differential, or almost any other Polaris side-by-side differential, we’ve got you covered.

It’s the Only Complete Aftermarket Differential

You can’t get a complete aftermarket Polaris differential from anyone else. Why is that, you ask? We take pride in our innovation and experience. We know how to make great parts, and we know how to make them better than they’ve ever been before.

We’ve invested in testing equipment that’s unmatched. Our test lab is a thing of beauty, and we make sure every part we send out meets our high standards. We snap axles, smash A-arms, blow up portal boxes, and even check gear strength and meshing (gasp!).

We also employ the best engineers who pool their decades of design experience to make amazing parts. They design parts with micron precision that makes for smooth operation and superior strength.

Put it all together and you’ve got a recipe for a killer differential that only SuperATV could make.

We Didn’t Forget About Can-Am

We’ve got a complete Can-Am front differential, too. Our SwifTrac Front Differential is one-of-a-kind in that it’s almost exactly like our complete differential for Polaris vehicles except it’s for a Can-Am. SwifTrac uses a sprague and armature plate to engage and disengage. It locks instantly when you need it and unlocks just as quickly when you don’t. Let that sink in. It’s a major upgrade over Visco-Lok that you need to check out.

Differential components
SwifTrac gets rid of the painfully slow Visco-Lok Front Differential on your Can-Am and replaces it with one that will instantly lock and unlock automatically. If you’re a Can-Am owner tired of losing momentum while you wait for your front diff to lock, you need SwifTrac.
Image by SuperATV

Enjoy Your Four-Wheel Drive

At the end of the day, you want to know that four-wheel drive switch on your dash is gonna actually do something when you hit it, and we’re here to give you an easy path to making sure it does. Our drop-in differentials work as replacements or upgrades so you can keep riding and keep blazing your own trail.

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2 Comments

  1. Avatar for Gary Airton Gary Airton says:
    November 5, 2020 at 4:58 pm

    Do you replace the center hub bushing on your super atv front differential

    Reply
    • Avatar for Tyler Lichlyter Tyler Lichlyter says:
      November 6, 2020 at 1:35 pm

      Gary, yes – we can rebuild these. Just give our customer service team a call at 855-743-3427! Thank you for the support!

      Reply

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