by Terry Kennedy » Fri Oct 12, 2007 6:02 am
[quote="DarthChicken"]I do service for a rally team in Oregon, and two weekends ago we did the wild west rally up in Washington. Over beers, I brought the whole "replace your rod ends every 3000 miles" comment, and a few of the guys looked at me a little weird.
One of them used to do baha racing. They used "Heim" joints, and said "don't use rod ends, use Heim joints, we never had one break out in the desert". So, I got home and looked up what a Heim joint is... and what do you know, its another name for rod end.
But it begs the question - would using the highest quality rods ends (or heim joints or whatever) reduce the need to service this part, or even make it a non-replacement part? If there is good enough ones out there to avoid being broken on a baha car, surely we can find something that will work on the atom that will last a good deal longer.... right?
[/quote]
I think the 3000 miles may have come from a suggestion I made to Brammo to *inspect* them every 3000 miles. Perhaps they're being overly cautious after my spectacular failure.
Rod ends have different names depending on who you talk to. The UK has a different trade name for them. Apparently this came from the companies selected by the governments to duplicate this ingenious part found on a captured WWII German aircraft.
If you could have an infinitely strong, infinitely reliable rod end, the force that currently makes it fail will cause something else to fail, which may be less pleasant. My suspicion for the size 6 suspension parts is that the "something else" would be the bellcrank anchor into the frame. The yellow SPM / SPW parts on the early cars were simply a part that wasn't strong enough for all possible forces acting on it.
The early signs of a failure on a SPM/SPW part is the injected Nylon liner starting to deform or fall out. On an AM/AB part, I suspect it would be the pressed-in flange starting to come out, but that would require *lots* more force. Wear-and-tear on an AM/AB part will be from grit (road dirt, etc) getting into the race and causing wear or binding of the ball against the Teflon liner.
This will be covered in detail in my "Owner performed maintenance" seminar.
[quote="DarthChicken"]I do service for a rally team in Oregon, and two weekends ago we did the wild west rally up in Washington. Over beers, I brought the whole "replace your rod ends every 3000 miles" comment, and a few of the guys looked at me a little weird.
One of them used to do baha racing. They used "Heim" joints, and said "don't use rod ends, use Heim joints, we never had one break out in the desert". So, I got home and looked up what a Heim joint is... and what do you know, its another name for rod end.
But it begs the question - would using the highest quality rods ends (or heim joints or whatever) reduce the need to service this part, or even make it a non-replacement part? If there is good enough ones out there to avoid being broken on a baha car, surely we can find something that will work on the atom that will last a good deal longer.... right?
[/quote]
I think the 3000 miles may have come from a suggestion I made to Brammo to *inspect* them every 3000 miles. Perhaps they're being overly cautious after my spectacular failure.
Rod ends have different names depending on who you talk to. The UK has a different trade name for them. Apparently this came from the companies selected by the governments to duplicate this ingenious part found on a captured WWII German aircraft.
If you could have an infinitely strong, infinitely reliable rod end, the force that currently makes it fail will cause something else to fail, which may be less pleasant. My suspicion for the size 6 suspension parts is that the "something else" would be the bellcrank anchor into the frame. The yellow SPM / SPW parts on the early cars were simply a part that wasn't strong enough for all possible forces acting on it.
The early signs of a failure on a SPM/SPW part is the injected Nylon liner starting to deform or fall out. On an AM/AB part, I suspect it would be the pressed-in flange starting to come out, but that would require *lots* more force. Wear-and-tear on an AM/AB part will be from grit (road dirt, etc) getting into the race and causing wear or binding of the ball against the Teflon liner.
This will be covered in detail in my "Owner performed maintenance" seminar.