New wishbone supplier

[poorpeet]

Just seen an ad in the back of practical performance car from a company offering new tubular front wishbones for £380 the set (of 4 I assume)powder coated with a 5 year guarantee
Anyone used them?

[tvrbob]

Word of warning on this.

The tubular wishbones are stronger but that can make things worse. Most road accidents result in a wheel hitting a curb. Do that with standard wishbones and you'll have a bent lower wishbone. Do it with tubular wishbones and your car will be written off because the chassis will be bent.

[spend]

How do you equate that logic to the back-end Bob?

Where the lowers are tubular & the tops sectional.

Dave

[tvrbob]

spend said:

How do you equate that logic to the back-end Bob?

The back end has this issue; the front does not. You would have to be doing a 360 to get the back end to bounce hard on a curb. The front will hit very simply by understreer or more likely over cooking a corner. Front impact with the curb is far more likely so having a built in crumple device is a good thing. I'm not suggesting that the car was built with this in mind, far from it, it's just something that by its weakness actually protects something more vulnerable and far more valuable. I considered new front wishbones when I had the Spider conversion done but the advice I got suggested that tubular was not the wise choice. In the end my existing wishbones were OK so I just painted them and refitted them.

[spend]

Hmmmm, sure its not a case of 'rusted' wishbones are likely to fail. I can see what you are driving at, but I can also see the advantages of tubular compared to sections trapping the demon sal tter (sorry just couldn't resist provoking the stupid censorship bot ).

Tubular is a better section to resist twisting (IMHO) and also in that it has fewer crevices to aid corrosion. Specifying the correct sacrificial failure properties is certainly an interesting point.

I certainly feel the tubular upper wishbones I have were a great improvement handling wise from the originals, even though they replaced the early feeble 2 piece versions. You also get the advantage of being able to play with the camber easily with some of the tubular wishbones instead of having to mess with wedges

I would certainly personally prefer tubular wishbones, but accept your reservations.

Dave