I also had a chat with doug (Falcon) lately, who rebuilds these gearboxes, and he was saying that the thing that kills the open center diffs in these is wheelspin, as the bearings arent designed for it and burn out (If I remember correctly)

Hopefully that gives you some more insight into why your diff kicked the bucket :)
 

rikkir
Are you sure the Beams S54 is LSD? The one i got in the halfcut doesn't appear to be LSD. I was going to stick with my existing S54 as i know its in great condition...

Some BEAMS S54 boxes are fitted with LSD's. Many are not. The diff that came in my Celica/BEAMS half-cut wasn't, but as I didn't really want one anyway, that wasn't an issue.
 
The biggest difference between the Bathurst S54 and the Jap-spec BEAMS S54 are the gear ratios.  The BEAMS box has shorter and closer ratios, which I happen to enjoy very much. If you were doing a lot of driving over the 110kph highway speed limit, top gear might be a bit short for some, but since that's not an issue for me, I much prefer having the closer ratios.
 
My mechanic just took the entire guts out of the BEAMS box and put them in my Bathurst housing, just keeping the selector rod from the Bathurst box (as the one from the Celica box is back-to-front in an MR2 due to it being FWD).

Did some reading a while back on mr2.com and they said Gen 3 3SGE S54's some gears were shorter than Gen 2 3SGE S54s not sure of the creditability on that tho..
 
I also came across a thread about Paul Woods putting a helical LSD from the Spyder's C56/65 into a S54 so that's possibly a cheaper option for the NA guys rather then shelling out for a Quaife. Just a matter of finding someone willing to part with it hehe
 
Extended 5th gear would be dainty lol

How's the OBX one holding up? Is it true that new washers/nuts and bolts and a bit of sanding down the rough edges should see years of trouble free motoring?