am just thinking of maybe making some from billet 20mm ali....

im a tad concerned about strength thou, and i dont want to go trying to re invent the wheel...

thoughts on this?

cheers

boggle

hmm, sounds expensive, and for what benefit? would solid save much weight over steel tube?

I've seem threaded aluminium bar used for trailing arms for rear axles on legends race cars, so i guess it can be done, not sure i would though

Can you find a cast alloy arm from something else and use that? Elise, or some other production car?

If you are replicating the standard locost wishbone then I would be extremely concerned about strength.

There's little point. The are in the centre of the triangle is largely reduntant in terms of stiffening the wishbone, and the tubes that comprise the wishbone agina gain their stiffness form the outer edges of the section, thus adding any more material to the centre would just be more weight.

So, there's no point. There's also the add drag from fatter sections.

There's two options for an improved wishbone, either use aero section steel or CF tubes or make some kind of GFRP cover to make it a single profile.

If you've ever held a standard wishbone you'd see there is little point in making it aluminum as there's very little weight anyway. You could get steel ones chromed or maybe coated in an aluminum deposit, quite a few firms do such coating. I originally painted mine in alloy look lacquer and they looked quite good.

cheers for the thoughts...

i was thinking of cutting a profile similar to that of the original front item and then machining the bush holes etc and radiusing the edges, i only thought of this as my old drag subaru had alloy lower wishbones....my biggest concern is the strength thou......its not something i have to do, but if it was worth devolping the idea i would give it some more thought, maybe cast alloy items?

Dont do it. The design requirements for an alloy wishbone are far different from those for a steel one.

As mentioned std steel wishbones weigh so little its hardly worth it.

The problem isn't so much strength but stiffness and fatigue resistance and that is before choice of alloy welding and heat treatment have been considered.

If you look at production car light alloy wishbones you will see none of the them are loaded in bending.

Changing the material of a highly loaded fabricated component from mild steel to a light alloy is not a trivial matter, aluminum alloys are not simply a lighter but weaker steel.

I'm afraid I'm seconding the don't do it.
By the time you counter for the weakness of the ali (compared to steel) you won't be much up on weight.
I must confess I don't really see much benefit in doing it, sorry mate!

Seems like a lot of work for little gain to me, but didn't the Jaguar 'E'Type use cast aluminium front wishbones ?

Hows it going Phil?

I'm just at my desk (in my unit now! ) warming my feet with the space heater I bought off you ages ago!!

On the OEM fornt, it's easier to mass produce a cast item than it is to weld a tubular item.

quote:

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Originally posted by brianthemagical
On the OEM fornt, it's easier to mass produce a cast item than it is to weld a tubular item.

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thanks everyone, im glad i asked before wasting time with it and people confirmed my worrys. i thought about titanium aswell, as i have access to some tube, but for now i think i will concentrate on some alloy front hubs carriers...

..........have you weighed a cortina one without the stub axle, they are pretty light! (bearing in mind the stub will need to be steel, and also bigger than std so it will go through the alloy upright and have a nut on the back...........

NO poo pooing the idea, but it would be easy to make an alloy one that was heavier than the steel one!

The heavy bits on the cortina setup are the brake parts!

^ and you can already buy them from places like rally design. the wilwood ones look pretty good too

tbh im not looking at saving weight....im 17stone so if i was going to save weight i would loose some off me first,(too many pastys) im just looking at being different, i dont want to make anything that would be dangerous, just make some one off unique bits...i have access to so much cnc machinary and i feel i could now use what ive learnt in the last 15years......

ahhh, ok, as long as its for the sake of it then that is always the very best reason for doing it!!

If you do make the uprights, if you can't be bothered/don't want to make the stub axles, you can buy them ready to use with nuts from randall motorsport (was going to post link but my pc has become stupidly slow so you'll have to google it)

i will probably make the stubs from en24t and cylindricaly grind, will pop one under the hardness comparetor and see....unless anyone else has made any?

to be honest I don't think they are that hard. I'm not an expert so don't sue me but I would say that EN16t would be fine. The std ones are not ground, only fine turned as far as I know.

Certainly I have seen a few where the bearing race has chewed into the stub!!