Shoutout to Diode Dynamics (their SAE fog FAILED and you won't BELIEVE what THIS COMPANY did next!)

Hello.

I already know I'm gonna take it in the kneecaps for the thread title and I don't even care. Do what you must, for I am already victorious.

Some of you may already know that I live in Salt Hell, Vermont.

If you already know about Salt Hell, you can probably just hit ctrl+f on your keyboard and search for "DD pod failure". If you want the full tl;dr, here it is - DD pods are dope and take a bad beating, and DD stands for Double Dope. Excellent company, customer service blew me out of the water.

I live in a place that eats machinery. There are many such places in the world, even some much worse, but not in places associated with contemporary American life. Lots and lots of dirt and gravel roads, almost always passable by regular traffic at a safe speed for the conditions (but maybe not much else). By many people's standards, extremely, uh, rural in the derogatory way that some people have about it. In other words, my truck gets whacked with all kinds of shit all day every day, anything the size of road gravel or smaller, flung by everything from the neighborhood junkpile that the kids all sell each other every 60 days to avoid plating it to big rigs hauling ass down the very, very wrong road because their GPS doesn't work here and they're new. Then there's the stuff I do to it in the woods. Or when the local kids can opener their rad and hood on my rear hitch because they're testing their $15 brake job by flogging it as hard as it will possibly go around a blind curve.

Truck does Truck Stuff.

Because of the long and extreme winters, relatively sparse population, and large amounts of unpaved roads, part of how they make it work in the snow seasons is not just by salting the shit out of the roads, but by also adding CaCl to the usual NaCl salts and brines used in most of what people call the Rust Belt. The same change in chemistry that makes the road salt melt at colder temperatures also makes it exceptionally harsher on typical automotive components.

Every single thing I attach to my truck takes it in the face, all winter long, like it's an ASTM salt test. If you don't know what an ASTM salt test is (and especially if you do), here's a link you can look at later. Basically, here's a uh, weird industrial website about ASTM salt testing machines and there are clean links to other related information - https://www.envi-chambers.com/astm-salt-spray-test/ - so feel free to fall down that rabbithole whenever.

Even powdercoat, if it isn't really, really perfect (read: $$$$$$), just gets blown off, because the tiniest nick in it lets the salt spray in, and then the cancer spreads underneath the powder in huge pockets. Before you know it, the powder is coming off in huge flakes from what you thought was a little chip and wanted to touch up properly, because the metal underneath is just turning into blue dust. Ironically the better a powder job is, the worse it is when this happens, because that powder will hold under its own integrity surprisingly well until you pick at an edge.

If you like something and want it to last, you just have to commit to paint and proper paint maintenance.

So, that brings us to the DD pod failure.

I'm going to use the word failure and I'm going to write really critically here. Before I do that I want to take care to prime you with this simple statement: I'm not even remotely mad about any of this. I'm literally only even writing this up because I'm actually pretty stoked.

I noticed that I had some pretty bad spots at the edges of my DD pod bezels, the round style if you care. I figured to take them out of the ARB and the really excellent Slee inserts I put them in ( link to the Slee/DD install thread here - https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/slee-bezel-install-diode-dynamics-fogs-in-arb-deluxe.739742/ ) and clean up whatever needed it.

Incidentally, the powder on the Slee insert was holding up just fine and the round bezels were doing what I hoped they would do when I picked them - doing a good job of blocking the holes to keep as much direct salt spray as possible out of the inside of the bumper, where the Warn is mounted. I'll take the Slees out of the ARB and give them a taste of the wire wheel when I get around to touching that up and cleaning up the winch, but for now, just a little rolling of the powder at the hard edges. No bubbling, chipping, or cracking at all, even on the directly front-exposed lips. The galvanized brackets were holding up way better than I expected. The paint was completely gone except for where the inside of the ears contacted the fogs, but it did still have galv on it, and I had no trouble at all getting the stainless barrel hex head screws out of the bracket/pod.

So, I popped the DDs out and got to cleaning them up. I'm not going to lie, this part was a horror show. It started with steel wool to break up the loose edges and ended up with a set of dental picks and dental hygiene tooth planing tools (I do a lot of scraping off powder and paint from nooks and crannies, sandpaper don't reach and I have to send out for sandblasting). I couldn't get a satisfactory (to my unreasonable standard) mask line on the ridged lenses, so I wanted to do as much of the extensive cleaning and sanding as possible with the units still sealed before I cracked the bezels off. I wasn't sure if there was a seal or something in there, and I didn't want to take it apart before I knew what I was going to be dealing with.

I emailed DD asking about how they were put together because the powder was gone and I wanted to paint them. They answered the question but then also sent me a free shipping code to use on replacement bezels, which were WAY cheaper than I expected. Like, honestly way cheaper than I would be willing to pay, but I had already bought fresh paint and spent the time cleaning them up, so I decided to go ahead anyway.

The screws looked stainless and the housings are aluminum, and given the state of corrosion on the surface, I knew the screws might need some help. I threw some PB Blaster on them and left them overnight, then hit them again about 10 minutes before I grabbed a new, sharp, correct sized Torx and rounded the absolute dogshit out of the very first screw I touched with what I told DD in a followup email was "very little provocation". This isn't the first time I've encountered this issue in Salt Hell (I wrote up Agency6 a while ago, and dealt with similar corrosion issues - https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/agency6-crazy-customer-service.793563/ )

I went back to the pods with some real fresh 3M blue tape, a new pack of razorblades, and some of the blunter dental picks and masked the lenses as good as they were gonna get. Some primer, a couple licks of satin black, and when I went to grab a sandwich, DD had already responded that this would be covered by warranty.

This blew me away, actually. Cosmetic issues for an externally mounted part are, in my reckoning, definitely a "me" problem from a warranty perspective, especially in Salt Hell. The things still work perfectly fine, good as the day I bought them, and I've never had a single lick of trouble. They are amazing little units.

DD also went out of their way to confirm my purchase details when I could only come up with cryptic hints - the month I probably bought them and the e-mail address I probably used for the order.

Before I could even think about it, there were a bunch of shipment confirmations in my inbox with two brand new ones on the way like magic.

The new paint ain't done yet. The black's dry by now but I decided I'm going to do the bezel fronts the same hammered gold I did my wheels, so they stand out. They deserve it.

 

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I'm gonna throw these up. I pulled the masking tape this morning off the bodies and chunks of powder came with. After some time with sandpaper, a dental scraper, and a wire brush, you can see exactly what I'm talking about with powder failure.



This isn't to say DD's powder sucks, it's to point out that they continue to do the important part - make good light- even after years in an environment that literally eats aluminum. These got cleaned, degreased, and a couple coats of rattlecan after verifying that the gold on the bezels was cured enough to stand green tape.

 

Strapped in and good to go. Same hammered gold as my summer wheels.

 

yea anytime i see a bd or dd or any cast body light get a chip or something and salt eats them quick. one thing i do love about the DD is the captured nut vs threaded body. the amount of ss bolts i have milled out of bd lights is high lol

 

Yeah, I was really glad at how easy they came out, I know exactly what a show it is getting a stainless/stainless-ish screw out of aluminum when they've been thoroughly brined and left in place for a couple years. It's a good design.

 

I also recently had to re-coat some of my DD stuff for the same reason, VT winters. Plus was that now its color matched to the bumper and I made a new mounting surface gasket out of 1/8" rubber. I have noticed my BD stuff has held up better, coating wise. Still big DD fan tho, their SAE Max fogs are on both my rigs and kick ass.