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Speedway Parts

AZCOWBO said:
Many of their parts are manufactured in China, where there is little quality control on steel production on many items. That is the reason when you buy hand tools made in China, they are inexpensive, along with cheap labor of course, and they wear out or break easily.
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Yep, there is no question Speedway buys some of it's stuff from China.......as do tons of other American companies. There is a good reason for that. You and I (the American Consumer) have forced them to do that to remain competitive. We have done it to ourselves.

When I was younger we bought from local merchants who bought and sold American products for the most part. You could go into the local hardware store and find good products and a salesperson who actually knew how to install and/or use that product. Then the Walmart's of the world came into being and we suddenly started wanting better prices and more selections. Mom and Pop stores couldn't compete because the huge discounters buy by the trainload. Pretty soon the small stores started to dry up.

Now, 50 years later we suddenly are PO'd that all of our jobs are going to other countries and the places where we buy stuff buy their supplies from those same countries. You and I did it to ourselves. We can kid ourselves and say we "only buy American" but that is just to make ourselves feel good. I take the blame for looking for the best price myself, and shopping at the Walmart's, K Marts, and other places like Autozone, Advanced Auto, etc. We have even forced the once solid NAPA to start buying overseas crap and to start limiting their inventory to fast turnaround items.

So the next time we go into one of the discount stores and bitch because there is no one to help us, or the person who does come over knows zip about what we are buying, we need to look in the mirror because that face staring back at us is who caused this mess in the first place.

Soapbox now put away. :D:lol:

Don
 
OOOOOPS sorry i thought this was the Lounge my Bad.
 
Parts

Here is what I think. The quality and grade of the steel we buy is not always what we ask for or are expecting. There is good quality Indian, Chinese, and American parts and there is some very poor quality Indian, Chinese, and American parts.
We have a Spirit style radius rod we have never had a problem with. We have had several problems with the hair pin style that we do not make but we stand behind if we sell it. We will soon be making the hair pin style in house where we will have more control over the materials used. It is an issue that we are aware of and are corecting.
Also I believe overall Speedway is a good company and does a pretty good job supplying parts for the hotrod industry.
 
A bit late in this talk, but a while back someone said they would make radius rods using solid stock, not at all good, as solid stock is not as strong as a tube... just needs to be a the right OD and wall thickness to begin with, plus, if you have a wheelbarrow loaded with lots of weight, it is much easier to lift that weight with longer handles... back to my point about leverage, radius rods for sure fall into this area... :D
 
Ted Brown said:
A bit late in this talk, but a while back someone said they would make radius rods using solid stock, not at all good, as solid stock is not as strong as a tube..
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Solid stock is certainly not as efficient as tube in terms of mass / strength ratio, but I can't see how the additional cross sectional area of a solid bar would make it weaker. If tube was stronger, rear axle shafts, bolts, and lots of other stressed parts wouldn't be solid, would they?

Bob
 
Ted is right. Strange as it sounds, hollow tubing resists bending more than solid steel. In something like an axle you are dealing with twisting force, but that is a different matter altogether.

Don
 
donsrods said:
Ted is right. Strange as it sounds, hollow tubing resists bending more than solid steel. In something like an axle you are dealing with twisting force, but that is a different matter altogether.

Don
Click to expand...
Axles, of course, have to deal with torsional loads, bolts deal with tension loads. For T buckets, the front and rear radius rods would seem to be stressed differently. The most severe load that front radius rods in T buckets have to deal with would be compression loading during braking, with the bottom element under somewhat less compression due to the axle drop acting as lever arm resisting axle rotation. They would bear the weight of the car and be subject to buckling. The rear radius rods have to resist axle rotation, and would be under some tension during braking. I'm not an engineer and can't explain it, but it sure seems intuitive that solid wouldn't bend more easily under those loads. Try this --- ask your favorite fabricator if his tube bender will bend 1 1/2" dia. .134 wall tube. Now ask him to bend 1 1/2" dia. .375" wall tube with the same force. Under the theory that for a given diameter, solid bends easier than tube, the thicker wall tube should bend more easily as it approaches solidity. Don't mean to appear argumentative guys, but I'm trying to understand the physics behind this.

Bob
 
Don, I am not sure I read your post right. It takes a lot more force to bend thicker wall tube than it does thin wall. When we were doing a lot of dragster work, we used a lot of 1" .058" 4130 tube. With a bender and a long handle it could be bent by hand. Now we use 1" DOM with a .219" wall on these radius rods and you have to use hyd to bend it.
 
Dom tubing work hardens when it is drawn over the mandrill.. the same reason cold rolled steel is stronger
 
RPM said:
Don, I am not sure I read your post right. It takes a lot more force to bend thicker wall tube than it does thin wall. When we were doing a lot of dragster work, we used a lot of 1" .058" 4130 tube. With a bender and a long handle it could be bent by hand. Now we use 1" DOM with a .219" wall on these radius rods and you have to use hyd to bend it.
Click to expand...

Exactly my point. Can we agree that for a given diameter tube, it's strength increases with wall thickness? Now think of a solid bar as being a tube with a wall thickness of half it's diameter. Let's start with a 1" tube of the thinnest available wall section, and start to increase that wall thickness. Under the assertion that the tube is stronger than a solid bar, then at some point as the wall thickness increases to .5" (1/2 the diameter) the bar becomes weaker. Can anyone explain at what point that occurs, and why? I still don't see it.

Bob
 
That's the answer I gave my Kids sometimes when they asked me something I didn't know the answer to.............it worked until they turned 10. :eek::D:lol:

Don
 
As grandpa use to say (Fact is stranger than Truth)
 
What if the parts in question had been chrome plated would this have weekend them?
I know we are not alowed to use chrome parts over here stainles steel is the thing we like cheers Keith:):lol::)
 
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