Front hub clicking, occasionally.

[bazzaboy]

The auto hubs on my new 2014 Y61 started making one hell of a racket a few weeks after buying it, while traveling to and from work. A couple of weeks after that, after it's first trip to the High Country, it never did it again. Right or wrong, I put it down to always manually locking the auto hubs when off road. No noises since?

Bazza

[the evil twin]

Yep, spot on Bazzaboy, thats the correct way to use the Auto hubs.
It used to be in the Owners manual but maybe they took it out.

'Auto' is for 'one off on the fly' work like tooling along and coming to a bit of sketchy track when you flick from 2H to 4H.
That means you don't have to stop and get out to lock the hubs.

'Lock' is for any extended 4WD operations, especially if you will be reversing and/or rolling backwards and forwards at any point.
Auto hubs will unlock in certain 4WD conditions if in the Auto and not the Lock selection and that is what damages them if you put power on at the inopportune moment as they are re-engaging

[john316]

just found this as I was looking through... Mine is an old GQ and the right hand side hub packed it in big time, so much so that I had to take the hub out to be able to get it to the doctor. the splines and the auto mechanism were pretty much stuffed but the fix was as easy as picking up a manual set from the local wrecker which were checked out and looked perfect. Put them in myself and have had the old girl towing a one tonne camper up and down some pretty rough tracks in the high country with long steep climbs etc and have never had a problem with them since. As an old dude getting out to engage the hubs is what I have always been used to so its no biggie. Better than the old girls that couldn't free wheel... does anybody periodically lock them up to circulate the oil in the front hub any more? good practice...

cheers

John