Here is why I lock the center diff at speeds and have done it regularly since I've been driving these things. Say 1999 I owned my own and have always had a Disco1 since that time.
Up here the worst weather conditions I get are when theres 4 to 6 inches of dry powder snow in all the thousands of empty acres around, and a steady 25 mph wind. You drive along at 60mph on pretty dry roads then you can see it ahead of you drifting accross the highway. Its just something about the terrain that makes it collect at low areas or follow ridges. But the snow will be like 4 or 5 inches deep on the road in that drift. So I lock the center diff before I leave the dry road and go onto the 5 inches of drift. Then when I'm back on dry road I unlock the center diff and decelerate till it lets loose(light goes out). I would say I've done that so often that if it was bad I would have broken one of them by now.
The drifting can get so bad that in a whiteout condition one time I hit a drift at about 30 mph and knocked the belt off the truck and bent the bumper back a little bit. After that I put those steering protectors on that bolts between the frame rails. The ones that make the frame rust out. That keeps the snow from knocking the belt off.
Up here the worst weather conditions I get are when theres 4 to 6 inches of dry powder snow in all the thousands of empty acres around, and a steady 25 mph wind. You drive along at 60mph on pretty dry roads then you can see it ahead of you drifting accross the highway. Its just something about the terrain that makes it collect at low areas or follow ridges. But the snow will be like 4 or 5 inches deep on the road in that drift. So I lock the center diff before I leave the dry road and go onto the 5 inches of drift. Then when I'm back on dry road I unlock the center diff and decelerate till it lets loose(light goes out). I would say I've done that so often that if it was bad I would have broken one of them by now.
The drifting can get so bad that in a whiteout condition one time I hit a drift at about 30 mph and knocked the belt off the truck and bent the bumper back a little bit. After that I put those steering protectors on that bolts between the frame rails. The ones that make the frame rust out. That keeps the snow from knocking the belt off.