Everyone with a superduty has at one time or another thought of ditching the autolocking hubs and switching to manual hubs.

I for one HATE the idea of having to get out and lock the hubs on my truck so I dragged my feet on this mod as long as I could. But eventually my hubs got where they wouldn't autolock and then they got where they were stricking even when locked and unlocked manually. So till I can justify $1000 to replace the factory auto lockers I decided to upgrade/switch to true manual locking hubs.

I did some shopping around and it seemed that warn had the best product out there. The premium hub line from warn has a few key features that interested me.

#1 No plasic parts. All metal to me in the way to go and far less likely to leave you stranded.

#2 The wave spring. This spring should resist fade far more than convential coil springs used in most hubs.

To install you put the oring around the knob part of the hub and insert the locking(geared) part into the hole where the factory hubs were. Then install the provided snap ring to hold the hubs in. At this point the hard parts over. But note the following to save some grief :)

After doing some research and looking at what others had gone thru one thing I noticed was a gap issue some people mentioned. Saying the hubs needed extra locking rings to seat correctly. So when I was installing mine I watched for this problem and I think I figured out what people ran into.  I ran into it myself but it turns out I had them installed wrong basically.

Here's a video clip I made of the hub installed incorrectly.

Heres a pic of how it looks installed the wrong way. Click on the pictures to make them full screen.

Heres what to watch for to install them correctly. There are 3 tabs on the knob and 3 slots on the hub itself. Make sure you match up the 3 tabs and it will always mount perfectly with no gap and will be perfectly sealed.

Heres the knob side tabs :

Heres the locker side slots for the tabs :

Once you have the tabs lined up, you simply screw in the 6 hex head screws and its done. Its very simple to switch over to the warns.

Now you have a strictly cosmetic issue. The hub caps for your wheels are spaced for the auto lockers. The warn hubs are shorter than the auto locking hubs. So there will be a gap. The following pics will show you what it looks like and later on I will post some pics when I get done solving this. There are several fixes for this but I'll wait to cover this when I get mine done.