maybe grab an HO that was the original thought for me b4 i stumbled onto this JK 44 housing dirt cheap. it 's been left to the weather for better than a yr now, the pinion no longer spins easily and the surfaces are pitted........it's crap.
02 TJ ball joint and knuckle issue
- Thread starter Derweibhai
- Start date
maybe grab an HO that was the original thought for me b4 i stumbled onto this JK 44 housing dirt cheap. it 's been left to the weather for better than a yr now, the pinion no longer spins easily and the surfaces are pitted........it's crap.
Ours are run on a big CNC mill. That isn't the problem. The problem is understanding the process, what to pay attention to and how to fix the issues when they arise. If you don't know what causes the problems or that they are even problems, then you don't know how to fix them.
That is just really sloppy engineering line control from Crown (or whoever runs the foundry for them in whatever country). These things can happen during manufacturing but they should never get out of the factory and into the hands of the end customer. There is no excuse other than "we don't give a shit".
I’d like to put a JK in the front honestly but after piecing it together with everything I’d want for it I’m knocking on the door of 4-5k… so that may be phase 2 or 3. Trying to figure out my best route. My suspension is in dire need of an overhaul/redo, and I can’t really afford to build a front axle and a suspension at the same time. If I can setup the front end that won’t require too much reconfiguring going from a TJ to JK axle that would be ideal. We’ll see how it all pans out.
i'm starting to notice a lot more we don't give a rats ass attitude, even where i work. seems like each generational changing of the guard so to speak, things are lost never to return. including manufacturing processes.
It falls completely in management, which generally falls into the 45+ age bracket. It’s not a generational thing it is a “we have to make them as fast as possible and let the consumer play the part of Quality control”. Things have been this way and getting worse for 30 years. Hell look at the Kragen reman starters and alternators 30 years ago. You could change 3 before you got a good one. We want to blame it on a younger generation, but it falls flat on the entire work force and management, all age groups.
We get it sometimes. Our first and second batches were good, then the third one started showing some shift. We had to rework the patterns and reject an entire batch of knuckles to get it resolved. In our case due to the beefed up casting changes I made, it was not a strength issue but one of aesthetics and "that isn't what I paid for".
This is what I rejected.
It comes down to taking pride in your work, and caring about the quality of your work output and realizing where your work fits in the larger picture and how it affects others directly or indirectly.
It has been my experience that unhappy people mostly don't tend to do good work, and it's a VERY rare person that can deliver the same quality irrespective of how they feel towards a job. I feel that people were overall happier in older days since life was simpler. But my theories aside, it is kind of eye opening when you realize how high quality OEM stuff tends to be and how little there is the aftermarket that is actually quantifiably/measurably better.
I don't disagree but if you look at the reject picture, all of the pertinent dimensions are dead on, the knuckle axis is perfectly aligned as it should be, only a few of the holes are aesthetically affected by the pattern shift. In case it isn't clear, there are two halves to a pattern that makes the cavity in the sand casting mold. Each half makes an impression in the sand with alignment dogs and then the two halves are put together to pour molten iron into. If the alignment dogs are slightly off, one side shifts out of alignment with the other side. You wind up with a mostly functional casting in our case but the aesthetics are less than desirable. We still hit all the dimensional numbers dead on, they just didn't look good. The other ones above are not the same in that they are functionally compromised.
I don't work with large groups of folks, all I know is even on my days where I'm not in the best shape for whatever reason, the customer still deserves the very best I can do.
I bet you got said you have "ridiculously high standards".
In semiconductor manufacturing .. we have what are called "Via"s that connect two metal lines that carry signal or power. Typically this is part of what we call the back end part of the flow (front end being the transistors themselves). We use extreme (as in wavelength) UV photolithography to make the patterns as to where the openings should be on the metal lines that need to connected to other metal lines above and below. Sometimes, the mask patterns that get generated towards making these openings have a small shift (in the order of few nanometers) and it can cause unintentional shorts and opens. It is called "mis-registration" in the lingo and whenever that happens, we have to generate the entire mask layer (which can be very expensive, since changing one layer may cause other layers to change, and hence new patterns generated for those layers as well). Note that just 1 via mis-registation can kill an entire chip that is functional otherwise.
Very many times, due to cost or the involved timeline, management wants us to figure out what the risk is (measured in terms of projected part returns per million for running the production line with the issue) before approving generating a new mask layer. We have to always fight the fight to push for the new mask layers since the amount of work it takes when we get a customer field return and debugging what caused it is a severe loss of time - but probably cheaper compared to the loss in terms of returned parts.
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Life wasn’t only simpler, it was affordable and manageable for the average person to carve out an enjoyable life for themselves on a weekly wage. Rent, housing and general cost of living are exponentially higher than even just 20 years ago much less 30-40 while wages haven’t even come close to staying in line. Then you combine that with the average citizen getting nickel and dimed to death by insurance, the gas pump and every which way. The fact of the matter is life is rather bleak for most Americans when the middle class has all but been eroded in front of our eyes. There was a lot more dignity in the average Americans job/career, life and general sense of “worth to society” if you ask me.
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Your eye for quality, both functional and aesthetic, is exemplary. Your expectations for your own work are higher than what anyone else ever looks for .. and it shows so clearly in every weld bead you put on, and every bolt you tighten. Even without you having to say that last bit you said .. I know you are in that rare category I mentioned.
Not at all. That is one of the main reasons I like working with my casting engineer. He has the same standards I do. He isn't local so he only knows the problems I bring to his attention and he has never disagreed with a single item. The only very slight resistance I've ever received has been a small bit of push back when I tried to get the surface finish of the castings up a bit higher. I know now that it adds a huge expense to move to slurry molds or essentially the lost wax method which I do not really need, like to have, sure, but not at triple the price. Given a choice, I'd like to see a knuckle done as a high strength heat treated forging but not something I'll ever be able to pull off for reasons including the best one which is that is a dumb product for stock TJ axles.
Same type of issue so you understand my challenges just on a much smaller scale, not the challenge, the shift.
What is unfortunate is that Dorman prides itself for better than OEM parts for the commercial trucking side but the automotive side not so much.
I only know of one acceptable Crown product and that's the OPDA. Kinda sad that someone actually did better than OEM on a product and it turns out to be Crown.