1985 Monte Carlo SS known as Barney

[carbuff]

Without copying/pasting all of the pictures in that hub post, man the specs on that hub are impressive! Presumably the stock spindle can handle the above which the hub should now be able to??? That's some serious forces...

[Ron Sutton]

Originally Posted by carbuff

Without copying/pasting all of the pictures in that hub post, man the specs on that hub are impressive! Presumably the stock spindle can handle the above which the hub should now be able to??? That's some serious forces...

No, I don't think so. I haven't run failure tests on OEM spindles. But I do not think old muscle car OEM spindles could handle 2540# of thrust load without failure. I'm pretty sure ... without running FEA analysis ... that the old OEM spindles would fail at those load levels. The snout would snap off the upright. But we're not seeing 2540# of thrust load on the front wheels. We're seeing 1200# to 1500#.

I have run flex tests on OEM spindles to see how much camber change was happening from spindle snout flex at higher G-loads. A typical GM spindle snout for a 64-72 A-Body, 67-69 F-Body or 64-74 X-Body flexes about .040-.045" at 1400# of load, which is about .5° of camber change. The Ridetech AFX dropped spindle flexes less, because it is a better spindle ... made out of better steel than the old OEM spindles. But in high loads around 1400# ... we see some flex in it as well. Just less. That is why Ridetech team cars utilized the Speedtech ExtReme spindle for awhile & then developed their own modular spindle that utilizes the C7 bearings.

The goal in upsizing the bearings is to handle the 1200# to 1500# thrust loads we're seeing ... to prevent bearing failure ... which can be catastrophic at speed on a road course. The 1130# bearing in some of our packages is "better" than the 917-921# bearings by 20% ... but still need to be monitored. The killer 2540# rated bearing we're utilizing in a lot of kits is overkill. I'd been fine with bearing rated at 1600#-1800#. But this 2540# rated Timken bearing is available through regular parts stores, so I went with it.

Hopefully that made some sense.