Well Grigg, bout all out of wind out here, but I’m gonna just take one more swing at it. Of course you can encourage the younger inexperienced guys here to experiment and modify their front ends if you’ve a mind to but I’m for discouraging the practice unless, like I said earlier, you have the “proper facilities and experience behind you”.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s we had a family owned machine shop/welding fabrication business in which I ran the welding end of it. My bro and I were racing midgets and sprint cars at the time. He was twisting the wrenches most of the time and I was piloting. To help finance the racing we got into building suspension components, i.e., front axles, radius rods, drag link, tie rod, torsion bars, etc. which I built in the evenings. All of the welding was done with TIG. As Doug has been pointed out, the front axles had to pass Magneflux at the beginning if each season for circle track racing.
Since half of our business was machine work, jigs and fixtures were a natural for all the components we built. A trip to heat treat under the guidance of the metallurgist there pretty much guarantied a good part. Also part of the equation was baking to avoid Hydrogen imbrutement after plating with any of the parts. And no, we never had a failure with any of these “fabricated” parts in spite of the beating they got from the dirt tracks we ran them on. When you’re talking racing, anyone that straps themselves into a car is, or should be well aware that in this situation these cars are being pushed to their limit and that components fail at times. Every driver in the field is playing the same game, and that just goes with the territory. On the other hand, your family or the guy next to you on the freeway should not be presented those same odds.
Well, maybe just one more breath left in me, think I might just change my handle to WINDY! All that said, every factory manual that refers to solid axle alignment stresses NO heat and we have had numerous members who work in front end alignment shops post here that they also nixed the practice of re-heating an axle to bend it.
FIN!
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
