New Carli lower issue - check this out!

[carlisuspension]

No worries, I sent a message to Robert, he's the internal command center official collared shirt wearing guy... nothing slips through his inbox

Keep me posted and let me know how things are working out for you.

 

[BILLVO]

No worries, I sent a message to Robert, he's the internal command center official collared shirt wearing guy... nothing slips through his inbox



Keep me posted and let me know how things are working out for you.

Will do!!!



I sent you a Pm also.

 

[Mobius1]

I have sent a PM also carlisuspension

 

[carlisuspension]

Ok guys, my first phone call this morning was Sage on the way back from a materials engineer and heat treatment meeting. Here comes some cliff notes;

- The materials and processes we're using are *very similar* to that of rear end gears, high strength steel and hardening processes. Everything is good; material checked out, heat treat checked out and the guy analyzing things said that the entire part doesn't need to get treated and threads shouldn't get cardorized, even though the first time around we were told that because we used high grade material, it was fine to heat treat.

The good news is that if the heat treated threads will either take, or will crack at the lowest thread, which is the bottom of the nut where the taper starts. If there is going to be a reaction in the material, it's going to show up immediately.

The great news is that we can refine the heat treat process down to just the cup and ball and mask the rest of the piece, so only the contact surfaces will be cardorized. Nothing else is changing, except that we're going to start heat treating the cup to one hardness and the pin to another (there will be a small gap, similar to the engineering used for ring and pinion gears, one is harder than the other) and only to the weight bearing contact surfaces.

Everything is sorting out and we're able to still use all of the pieces we have machined and we're going to wrap up a set and Sage is going to spin one on the mill and then put it under the 20 ton press and see if he can get it to fade.

It's a lot better news than Sage thought, so that's cool. As far as everything else goes, we're going to take a little more time tweaking the process and perform some more testing.

I'll post some updates here as well as the blog as things develop. I think I covered it all, if Sage drops some more info on me, I'll forward to you'll here too.

 

[BILLVO]

One thing I noticed was that you show lube grooves in the ball on a set you tested but the new ones do not have the lube grooves and I notice when greasing them that the tolerances are so tight that it only will take a pump or two of grease and it is hydraulic locked and it needs to be driven to work its way through and around the ball and pin ect. My opinion is that if some are lax on greasing them they would have galling issues for lack of lube working down around them. This is just what I noticed and wanted to know why the tolerances/design are so tight as to not let the grease flow through rather than have it "Work" its way through?



I bring this up because I see issues with this sort of thing working on heavy mining / construction equipment.

 

[carlisuspension]

If you get a pump or two of grease, you have PLENTY in there. This isn't a situation where you're going to keep pumping until you see grease squeezing out a seal somewhere. I think the biggest misconception here is the amount of grease that is necessary. Proper lubrication means there's a light skin of grease between the contact surfaces, that's all.

I would recommend that you give your BJ's a pump a couple times a year, maybe do it when you change your oil or line it up with another maintenance thing and do them at the same time to make it easy to remember.

The smoother the surfaces the better. We greased lowers with 1 or 2 pumps, then loosed the cap screws and grease came squeezing out, it gets all the way into the cup with the smooth ball. The slotted design has more 'potential' for galling than the smooth design.

 

[carlisuspension]

These are photos of a prototype set, the first set to ever go into Sage's truck where there wasn't an o-ring so we can test what happens when the lube is gone, the surfaces are contaminated with dirt and stuff and the ball joint has been in the dirt, through water and lots of highway miles. Once it was pulled out, I took the photos and wrote about it.



Prototype Pin Testing:



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The smoother the surface the better. Galling potential increases when there's uneven surface contact.



The biggest misconception is the amount of grease necessary for proper lubrication. It takes a light "skin" of quality grease on the mating surfaces and it's good.



We have tested the smooth ball design with 2 pumps of grease and then we loosened the cap screws and instantly grease started squeezing out. It gets in there.

 

[carlisuspension]

sorry about the double post, I came back and didn't see my stuff... so I started over.

I forgot to turn the page :d

 

[BILLVO]

From seeing alaskas broken piece it looks to me like it hydraulic locked and the pressure had to escape somewhere and it broke out the bottom retaining ring. That is if he has a good grease gun that could actually pressure things up to 2k psi if he has a good grip and the o-ring held the pressure. This is just my opinion from what i see and know.



With the tolerances and with what you posted about the grease oozing out when you loosened it says it needs a vent hole so it doesn't break parts. Internal pressure can cause just as much or more damage as external forces on parts.

 

[carlisuspension]

forearms like Popeye and a Kung-Fu grip to boot!

 

[BILLVO]

Just trying to help you prevent future problems and maybe make you think of new improvements to prevent damage from things you may have not consider during R&D.



I edited my post about the same time you posted so you may have missed my last statement in the post above yours.

 

[carlisuspension]

I think I did miss something, i thought you were joking. The materials and processes we're using are *very similar* to that of rear end gears.

I would imagine that the o-ring or cap screws would be the first to go if we tried to press grease in with crazy hi pressure.

I thought you were joking about grease forcing a cup to fracture.

 

[BILLVO]

I am posting what I have seen over the nearly 20 years of being a heavy equipment diesel mechanic. A regular el cheapo grease gun will put out over 2,ooo psi of pressure especially the long handled ones. O-rings will hold an unbelievable amount of pressure and here in ND with 120+ degrees of temperature fluctuation in a year a bit of pressure at -20 will become a lot of pressure at 110 degrees if it has no way to bleed or vent off then you add the pressure created by use and shock loads and you have extreme pressure.



Rear end gears are my specialty and I have replaced hundreds of sets of destroyed ring pinion sets over my career. Beings as they are hardened doesn't make them indestructable.

 

[carlisuspension]

1 or 2 pumps, 2 or 3 times a year. Good to go. Grease gun aint gonna explode a ball joint.

 

[BILLVO]

Well fellas, I just drove from Anchorage to Denver and decided to lube my suspension due to this annoying squeak/squeal when I'd turn my wheels at very low speeds (parking lots, etc... )



I narrowed it down to the drivers side ball joint area. I have Carli's both upper and lowers. I greased the uppers and then, on the drivers side, started to put grease in the lower joint.



I got about half a pump, sqeezed a tad bit more and pop - out comes this little jewel from the bottom of the joint.

I don't know if this is detrimental or not. I'm going to get Carli on the phone Monday A. M. and ask.



Second set and it appears as if I'll be getting a third.

1 or 2 pumps, 2 or 3 times a year. Good to go. Grease gun aint gonna explode a ball joint.

Not trying to be a turd here but I brought the first post into play with his exact description of when it broke being highlighted.



Not everyone has common sense to not force the grease into it and you know that some will use all the force thy can muster to try and get it to take grease which I for see you seeing a lot more of this type of failure due to it. .

 

[carlisuspension]

Grease gun aint gonna explode a ball joint when it was processed correctly during heat treat. Guess I should have been more clear.

 

[BILLVO]

Ok... got me there... ... ... . :-laf

Time will be the test.

 

[BILLVO]

6k-10k psi grease gun pressures

I stand corrected... . I checked the specs on most brands of grease guns today and they are rated at 6,000-10,000 psi way higher than I even thought.

 

[AlaskanCummins]

I may stand guilty as charged on putting too much pressure into the ball joint, but as Sage has said, a proper heat treated joint shouldn't have popped out the o-ring in the joint. But, in my defense, I barely squeezed, as the more I got into it, the more this annoying noise would go away.



Which leads to this:



I had originally attempted to add grease due to this terrible noise (like rubbing your dry hand on a blown up balloon) and narrowing it down to the drivers side knuckle. This noise started at the end of my first day driving outside. It was very noticeable in parking lots, turning my wheels. It'd do it every now and then on bumps, but I'd only hear it at slow speeds.



Using common sense, I figured that the only thing different in the front end were the new lower bj's and, since I narrowed it down to that area the joint needed grease. Which leads me up to the following:



I decided to take the truck into a shop in Ft. Collins to have the drivers lower replaced for peace of mind. This was on Tuedsay, prior to driving to southern New Mexico on Wednesday. I asked for the old joint back so I could send it back to Sage (no return lable for me neither).



I held onto the cup and rotated the ball/shaft and felt some resistance. Since I like to see what makes things tick, I figured taking it apart wouldn't hurt since the cup was shot anyway. What I found in the joint were these deep gouges on both the cup and ball - BINGO - the squeak/squeal that was bugging me since day one of my trip.



I think that the only way this could happen would be some sort of contamination that wasn't cleaned out or got in there somehow on assembly at this miserable machine shop that Sage has since fired.



I want to be clear to everyone that these issues are the fault of the machine shop, NOT Carli engineering and design. I can't wait to see the results of the new product when they start using the new machine shop.



Photos of the carnage to follow... ... .

 

[DPalmquist]

Just curious how many miles did you get out of the Moog's?