Fitting 35’s with minimal trimming NOW ADDING LONG TRAVEL AND 934 CV’s

To comment, truck has been strapped since we put the front together. And as many issues we had with the radflos, we cycled that thing 100 times. We serviced the front end late summer, had all the ball joints out for some other emf issues. They did state that there were issues with the caps and what not when Will sent them pictures of them. Still a weird failure but glad it happened while basically not moving.

 

FWIW, you’re only going to get lowers. At least that’s all I got. Honestly just gonna order an upper kit from dirt king and be done. I have absolutely zero faith in these EMF’s. And it makes me sick to my guts seeing yours fail like this doing nothing. You can visibly see it’s been cracked for a while. Imagine highway speeds. Glad it all worked the way it did though. Couldn’t ask for a better place to have a catastrophic failure.

 

Is this what you’re going with? I’d like to upgrade the uppers as well

https://dirtking.com/products/upper-arm-spacer-kit-dk-811925

 

That is correct.

 

You said you just serviced them and had the ball joints out. I wonder if during reinstall they were clocked differently and that put stresses on them they weren't used to.

 

I hate uniballs with a passion, but they certainly don't fail like that.

 

If you make a uniball fail, you’re doing something wrong. Wear is one thing. A complete failure? Not gonna happen.

 

100% chance they were clocked differently. But it’s a ball joint that’s supposed to have full range of motion. I mean I get the theory that in its original orientation maybe there was excessive force applied primarily in one direction and then after reinstall it was going in another direction. Like bending a paper clip back and forth. But that’s a big stretch. Ball joints are for dd’s and mild wheeling. Lt applications should have a uniball

 

One thing to note. His joint broke right at the stress riser. EMF’s have sharp cuts at the base to taper transition. This creates a natural stress riser.

Material hardness also applies here. If the ball is a hardened part, so is the shaft. Hardened stuff likes to crack rather than bend. With a uniball setup, you’re at minimum going to bend the bolt before a full shear off type failure.

My two cents.

 

Interesting. I'm following since we have to use ball joints on our VW class 9 car and we replace them every 200-miles or any big hit/side load.

 

Looking at the design of a normal ball joint. You won’t find a stress riser like this. EMF’s however have the large base to get a wrench on. And that’s exactly where said riser is created. And that’s been the failure point of every broken EMF I have seen thus far.

 

By rules we're also limited to 'factory' ball joints which are either Febi or Bilstein. Sometimes we get a batch of Brazillian but we replace those sooner.

 

These are from when we pulled them in Aug 1-3rd

 

Good discussion about them though.
We’ll be looking at swapping the uppers also to 1” uniballs.

 

Kinda looks like the cup had been hitting the shaft in that first pic, creating a shearing force, but maybe that is just a grease mark.

 

You can’t get enough uptravel or droop to metal to metal the lower joint.

 

Gotcha, maybe just from when they were off the truck then.

 

Grease on them. When we took em out then greased them again on install.
As my issue was with the top cap and it wearing into the ball part of it.

 

The takeaway is this.

Jd recognized and rectified the issue. Good luck, finding another company that will do that. I respect the hell out of them. Some of us beat the ever living hell out of these things. They really didn’t owe us anything. I’ve always been well taken care of any time I’ve had any sort of issue. And I applaud all of it.

 

Wow