How often should you get your differential serviced? What is a differential used for? What’s a rear differential? All of these questions will be answered by this article.
How Often Should You Get Your Differential Serviced?
How often should you get your differential serviced? The answer to this question can be found in the most authoritative source available to you: the owner’s manual for your particular vehicle. It is also a document that most car owner’s never even open. It gathers dust in your glove compartment or your garage, and that’s really quite unfortunate, as it provides a ton of info about your vehicle. A jeep for example should have it’s differential fluid changed every 15 ,000 miles. Your car or truck’s differential fluid is essentially a lubricant, and like transmission fluid, it doesn’t evaporate, but it can be subject to thermal viscosity and breakdown. Differential fluid is necessary for the smooth operating of your differential.
What is a differential used for? It transfers power from your vehicle’s transmission to either the outer wheels or the inner ones as you’re making a turn. Without differential fluid, or a differential that is acting up, you could conceivably lose control of your vehicle. This is a good thing to know, but there is still another question left for us to answer here.
What’s a Rear Differential?
What’s a rear differential? A rear differential is a component of your car’s power train assembly, and it is a combination of gears as well as some computer modules. As we touched on above, it is also important for the safety of your car. Losing power to your differential is equivalent to losing power steering on your car. You could find your vehicle is much harder for you to control.
You want to make sure that you can control your car both when you accelerate and slow down, as well as make a turn, and a differential handles all of these tasks easily. Ironically, if you change your differential fluid, this is one of the cheapest repairs there is, mere pennies compared with replacing the unit.
So remember, you take care of your car, and it will take care of you. So rotate your tires and get your oil changed. Make sure that you read your car or truck’s owner manual, not just skim it. And whatever your owner’s manual recommends is the final word on getting differential service.
Trail Transmission
11240 East Apache Trail
Apache Junction, AZ 85120-3529
(480) 986-7367
https://trailtransmission.com/