I dont know why a welded front would cause knuckle studs to shear. When it comes to welded there seem to be 2 opinions. Its harder on the dif, or easier on the dif. The nature of a lunchbox is in the backlash, from my understanding, and that equals SLOP. Welded will have less slop in the dif as compared to a lunchbox. I for one have a lot of buds that run a welded front, and they never have any issues, other than it being hard to turn on grippy stuff.

This is because the lunchbox lockers work the opposite of a DIFF.... spider gears let the power transfer to the wheel with the least amount of traction instead of the wheel with the most traction which is what you want in off camber situations. The ratcheting mechanism lets you turn a hell of a lot easier but more moving parts equals higher chance of failure under extreme abuse. If you weld your spider gears then you are creating a straight up SPOOL which means there should be NO SLOP because you've deleted the DIFFERENTIATING action of the spider gears besides the backlash between the R&P.

I run the lockrite upfront on my 85 on 39.5's.... stock birfs is the only problem here (not for long!) it works for now but I would rather have an ARB or an Elocker for sure. But then again the whole $$$$ issue comes into effect