Oh also, I noticed you mentioned that your frame was designed for the newer GTO/Vette mounts - does this mean that it will not work with older ls1's? If this is the case is there somthing that can be done to allow it to work, such as buying the newer mounts? (if they'll even work).

 

The mounting points on all the LSx blocks are the same. You'd simply use the GTO/Vette aluminum mounts instead of the F-body steel clamshell mounts.

 

I'm always suprised to see how crappy mass produced items are. I've worked in automotive, tool and die, manufaturing and prototyping for most of my life and have seen stuff go from design to finished product and usualy the driving force is price not quality, If I want something good I'll make it myself, unfortunetly not everyone can do that. The price between a thinner gauge material and thicker one is nominal, same with the time to weld fully or both sides of something. The finished product is a superior one that speaks for itself. The problem with something like an engine cradle is I don't want to spend all that time with a engine hanging in a car mocking stuff up trial and error designing my own. Unless someone has some drawings with dimensions I'm stuck buying one and fixing it myself. OK almost done venting. I saw a guy selling solid diff mounting bushings on ebay for $50, I almost fell of my seat laughing. CNC made. Production cost on someting like that about $5. Now I know how to raise money to pay for my cradle LOL. OK I'm done.

P.S. I'm intrested in working on a cobra irs cradle for the fc.

 

"Production cost" for my 2006 Corvette is probably about $5k. If you can make me another one for that I'll throw in an extra $2500 as a bonus. Because R&D, tooling and the other line items on GM's P&L don't have anything to do with the price I paid for mine, it was all profit, right?

 

Your point is true but how much R & D goes into copying a simple existing part and making it out of a different material? People and OEM manufacturers have been using plastic for "performance suspension" for ages it's not rocket science. I should make some out of "Nylatron" ,it's a nylon and molybdenum disulphide composition plus it's got a really cool sounding name and it looks neat, sort of a mottled charcoal grey. I could charge $75 a pair.

 

If you had to contract out production of your parts at $60+ an hour then yes, you would charge $75 or more for a pair of bushings, especially after you factored in materials, transportation, shipping, packaging, and your personal time, not to mention R&D costs. I suspect you'd want to make a little profit as well.

There's a lot more that goes into the cost of a part than how complex it seems to be at first glance. If you can make bushings for $5 each, do it. I'm sure there are plenty of people who will be more than willing to pay less for something that provides similar or identical function.

 

I'm becoming interested in your front cradle Jim as I am not overly impressed with Hinson parts at the moment.

 

Was under the car yesterday and have complete sub-frame seperation. Let me tell you the story.

Last year myself and a friend autoxed my car. Mind you the car was just finished in September of 06. Autoxed and noticed the car really did not seem to handle like my other FD. My friend and I chalked it up to running road race tires and not autox tires.

Anyway the car did not handle that well but we pushed it anyway. I was coming around a corner on course with a little slide going, but it was controllable. Then I hit a small bump in the course. Now I know in a less than ideal traction situation when you lighten the power end you can spin.

Well as I said all was well then when I hit the bump the car just spun around putting me into a fence. In all the years I have been racing I have NEVER lost control of a car like that. I was really confused as to why it became so wild. The guy sitting with me is the same one who got me into autoxing. Even he was very surprised and also could not understand why the spin was so sudden.

So after the body shop and thousands of dollars later I picked up the car and took it to another shop for a look at the underside. Guess what, the sub fram was seperated just before the Driver Side Lower A arm.

I believe what we thought were poor tires was the front end flexing and seperating. Then when I pushed it and started sliding the car became very torqued but controllable. When I hit the bump the subfram must have split enough to cause the front alignment to go so out of wack it caused the spin.

I have called Hinson and was told, yes we had some problems. He will pay for shipping and fix the problem. However when I asked him about paying for the labor to pull the sub-frame he said he would not.

So anyway, I have been happy with the car and Hinson except for the PS Pump and those of you who have it know what I mean. However to have this happen and only pay for shipping to fix the break is very dissapointing.

I will send the part back to Hinson for the fix. But I must say at this point I would not suggest anyone use Hinson unless you have a written guarantee that any part that fails due to workmanship within a fair amount of time, be covered under warrenty for the part and the labor to replace the part.

I have never, ever said anything negative about any vendor we have. However to me this is poor business work. Had he offered to pay the cost of labor and of course fix, I would have had nothing to say about his willingness to stand behind his work. However this really sours me.

Allan

 

If I may say so, for the level and quality of the car you are building, Jim's would fit your needs much better than the other options!

 

have you posted this on TC?

-dj

 

Have I posted this on TC?

No

 

No aftermarket supplier of any part is going to offer that. It's too bad that you had a problem, it does suck. But nobody is going to cover more than replacement of the part, from Hinson to Edelbrock to Joe-Bob's garage on the corner. Labor is ALWAYS on the consumer, unless the manufacturer installed the part. Unless Hinson built the car and that's who you bought it from, consider yourself lucky to not have been hurt and cross your fingers the replacement is better than the original. That's just the way it is.

 

This is an interesting read...

But I agree with Crash Test Joey... In ideal world, i would like people to cover labor for giving me shitty parts (I recently bought an external Hard Drive and spend 2 hours trying to get it working.. but it was just false advertisement and pieces of junk... the took it back but didnt pay me for the time).. but unless its from a factory and backed up by some million dollar company, they will not cover labor. Its like the engine builders and turbo builders... I don't know of a single builder who would cover labor of removing and installing....

 

I don't get it. I inspect boiler and pressure vessel welds and parts. You don't need to be a genius to detect a bad weld and you certainly don't need to be a genius to make a decent weld with good penetration.

My job is to inspect this **** because when it fails, people die. Sounds like potentially a similar situation here. This "new hire" crap is bullshit. You need an experienced welder? You hire one. If you hire a welder to do a job and he does it inadequately, well then first of all, you hired the wrong person (maybe you need to retool your hiring process). Secondly, to send out parts that were inadequate means you have no method of quality control.

Another thing that bugs me is the crappy material excuse. I take it Hinson has no kind of receiving inspection when they accept material? They don't bother to verify the composition of the metal to even check if it's weldable quality? What the **** are they actually doing then?

They could probably pick up a handheld ultrasonic tester for a few grand. If they really cared about quality, they'd do that. Hell, they may even get out some liquid penetrant and start randomly checking one out of every dozen or so for cracks in the welds. It seems to me like there's not even a basic visual inspection of these finished products. And this would all be well and good if Hinson were some backyard mechanic selling to RX-7 enthusiasts with a disclaimer saying "I just make the ****, I can't be guarenteed it won't fail."

But this is "Hinson Super Cars." It sounds like a big, high-dollar tuner and fabricator of quality parts. And they certainly try to maintain this image on their website. So for them to portray this professional image and yet make the parts in the most unprofessional way possible, well that's just crap.

None of this **** would fly with the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel code. You can't even make a single fiber-reinforced plastic vessel (carbon fiber nitrous bottle, for instance) without making another one and blowing it up first. Everything from the materials poured into the heat to the stamping on the vessel is controlled in the construction of them. Like I said before, they take this **** seriously because people can die. The fact that Hinson doesn't says a lot.

 

Jim, I still want a cradle, if you can get someone to make one. I'll pay whatever it takes.

I'm glad that I got rid of my Hinson subframe. I don't think I would have had any trouble with it falling apart, however. It was too small to even fit on my RX-7 and most likely wouldn't have fit on any other.

 

my trans mount also broke.

 

Your points are not applicable in this application. I've been in the petrochem industry for 15 years with much of it in pressure equipment (lots of failure analysis, fitness for service, and inspection work)and have seen lots of nice looking welds that suck. Lack of fusion cannot be found with nde unless it's an inspectable config like a butt weld or a groove weld. Hell, even the ASME code allows for a vessel to be built without x-ray or shear wave testing of welds, ever hear of a joint efficiency less than 1? And guess what, fillet welds and many groove welds are only surface examined, that won't find lack of fusion unless it extends to the surface or toe of a fillet weld and even then it's gotta be a really poor weld. I can go on all day about how little inspection and QA/QC is required for ASME VIII Div 1 pressure vessels, it's because the range of applications/materials/design allowable stress/thickness typically promote fail modes that result in leak before break or fracture.

I'm not trying to make excuses for Hinson, he has none in these instances of failure, but be real about these shops as most all of the "tuner" and fab shaps have no QA/QC (I've been in many high end race shops btw). Did I say no QA/QC? Yes I did. The most I've seen is straight beam UT for thickness for tubing wall thickness verification, and guess what, no test blocks to be found in the shop and no qualified technicians and no quality program etc etc.

I own Hinson stuff and I am not happy with their failures, I purchased prior to their public weld quality issues otherwise I would have shopped elsewhere or at least ground thru some welds to check for lack of fusion. I do give them credit for making my LS1 V8 a reality but I am not happy that I have to watch these areas for signs of failure.

Never mind me, my opinion has been dismised so many times on this forum I don't know why I even bother any more. Sorry to post in your thread Jim.

 

Jim - add me to your cradle list

 

btw,

just for the record, my transmount was really easy to fix and I'm complaining. It broke at a weld, but it was easy to get it repaired. I figured it was more of a fluke than anything.. My subframe hasn't given me any trouble so far.

 

Right, but there still are quality control checks. You don't just grab a piece of plate and roll it into a vessel and slap a stamp on it (boy, that would make my job a hell of a lot easier). Does Hinson even know what metal he's using beyond "stainless" or "carbon steel?" Every time a shop makes a vessel, I've got pages and pages of calculations to review that are based off the properties of the metal to make sure that everything is accounted for.

ASME code does change all the time, I mean they've been doing this for how many years? So they do have the advantage of "good engineering practice."

I don't disagree with you. You're making perfectly valid points. All I'm saying is that a subframe failure could be potentially fatal if it occurred at the wrong time (doing 70 on the highway). To me, for Hinson to be sending these out the door with so many problems, despite this risk of serious accidents, is irresponsible.

I don't know... I wouldn't buy anything from them because of all this. If they've had these same problems for a few years now, that tells me that they haven't bothered to fix the problem, which in my opinion means that they don't care about their name. If they don't care about their own reputation, then I certainly wouldn't trust them.

 

^ The problem with "shops" like this will always be that when you get down to it they understand very little of the design and engineering that goes into any part. It's just some guys in a garage melting pieces of metal together.

Why can't they do it any better? Simple. They don't know how.

 

+1

 

So your options are to Pay Top $ (and hope they are expensive for a reason) or go to a welder that you personally know...

Since any other method (incl. Jimlab) involves trust and hope that the person doing the work has a concience...

This isn't a Jab @ Jimlab, it's just if you remove the burdon of responsibility from Hinson, how do you know your alternative is going to gain you the amount of piece of mind that you need ? If you're not an expert you're placing your "Life" in their hands to check and make sure it's done right...

And since it's the RX-7 disease, everytbody wants top quality for rock bottom prices...