Long Travel BS Thread

Nothing has ever made me want to punch babies. How bad could those shims be???????

 

Honestly not end of the world bad, but absolutely frustrating with man sized hands. Bolting on a bracket is just so much more enjoyable.

 

That’s funny you say that, cause If you look at the UV damage on my silver truck
It looks like little blisters

 

you telling me you’ve never wanted to punch a fat kid at k mart? I want your life…

 

Pretty crazy stuff here. The exact reason 4130 shouldn’t ever be MIG welded.

Cody Millers Can Am that the front end quite literally fell off of during KOH.

Coming from the car world, you would be absolutely hung in public for MiG welding 4130. Yet in the off-road world it’s said to be “ok” by a select few.

Interesting stuff nonetheless to see all of these failures in the HAZ. Clearly whoever did it can weld pretty well. But….. wrong tool for the job I suppose.

 

yeah ct raceworks posted a bit about it after the race and it almost seemed like excuses for shoddy workmanship…. If you’re gonna build chassis…especially chromoly race chassis maybe don’t skip corners…. I’m not sure if they normalized the steel after but if not that could be a whole lot of it… aws does have processes for MiG welding chromoly but you definitely should use er80 and you need to normalize unless they say it’s small tabs I think under like 1/8” thick.

 

His team is getting roasted pretty good too. They've probably deleted the posts at this point, but a few days after the race, they essentially said "shout out to our fabricators. The tubing failed, but their welds all held strong". it was quickly pointed out (about a hundred times in a row) that while the welds may be intact, they were infact what caused the failure.

 

yeah I see both Cody and CT have deleted the posts about the failures…like hey we all know what happened… I feel like with social media these days it’s so hard for people to just be honest about the mistakes they’ve made…egos are just too high…

 

Or, the whole normalizing process is skipped if you just TIG out of the gate. Though normalizing after TIG will make it even stronger.

The crazy part to me was a big team making such a monster mistake. For what? To save some hours on weld time?

All I know is in drag racing, TIG is the ONLY accepted form of welding on 4130.

Sometimes this side of the automotive performance world makes me scratch my head.

 

For the non-fabricators, what caused the failure?

 

MiG welding puts too much heat into chromoly to be an effective method of welding it. This causes the area around the weld (heat affected zone or HAZ) to be large and it makes the material brittle in these areas. TIG is a much more focused heat that creates a much smaller HAZ.

To clarify, you can also get too large of a HAZ with TIG if you aren’t proficient with it. So it’s not like TIG is immune to it. But it comes down to the guy doing the welds.

 

That makes sense. Couldn’t you mitigate it by preheating the material outside the welding area then covering it with a blanket to cool it more slowly?

Sound like you’re almost heat treating a localized area without any normalizing or quenching.

 

One thing to note is that I'm pretty sure every tacoma long travel kit on the market uses 4130 uniballl cups and are all MIG (that I'm aware of). Not saying it's right or wrong, but all those manufacturers are accepting some type of risk.

 

more like breaking down the heat treatment unless you do any mitigation. But yeah slow cooling is also an option that helps.

 

Same problem with Locked Bump stops. So I put some high pressure valves (300 psi) in a cheap 90* extension. Not ideal, but it works.

90 Degree Tyre Valve Extension Adaptor for Car Motorcycle Bike Scooter 2 Pack Universal Extenders

https://www.amazon.com/ILOVA-Extens...4989&sprefix=schrader+valve+90,aps,313&sr=8-3

 

In this particular application, the biggest benefits of post weld heat treatment are the removal of hydrogen (hydrogen embrittlement is what we're trying to avoid), and it changes the crystalline structure in the area. Slowing cooling with the aid of insulating blankets can minimize stress in the area to a point, but the area has to be held at a certain temperature for a duration to effectively accomplish the above two things. To hold it at temperature, typically the weld area is wrapped with ceramic heating blankets. For chromoly, that temperature is ~1200 degrees. You do then have to slowly cool it down from that, but the thinner the material, the faster it can be cooled without risking reintroducing stress. Roll cage tubing is very thin in the grand scheme of post weld heat treatment procedures.

In no world do I see race shops doing computer controlled post weld heat treatments on their chromoly welds, so best to just stick a good TIG welder on the job.

 

Finally installed this. I was anticipating some vibrations but not experiencing anything significant. I had been running the spicer ford ranger center support bearing with spacers.

 

I follow Jason Heard a fair bit on IG and he’s heat treating entire chassis, arms, everything.

 

That's awesome. Hopefully the PWHT processes he's using are from AWS procedures for the alloy, thickness, and weld methods. It's extremely unlikely that you do any harm with an incorrect PWHT, but you can certainly waste a whole lot of time and energy with minimal/no gain.

 

Anybody have a clue why no rear facing lights in my truck are not working?

3rd brake light not working
D and P side turn signal, brake, and reverse are not working.

Checked fuses, grounds, everything. I'm fucking lost.

Someone with more brains than me give me some advice please