blueprint 408

Brad - As I noted - Andrew only posted (I'm pretty confident) when someone pointed him here. 2 posts in a year tells me that. So I'm sure there's the "third side of the truth" somewhere in there but no Kudos for addressing the issue in this post.
In terms of your risk management - I think the difference is "almost 0 %" has to be the standard when the vehicle is airborn because failure means almost assured reath for the pilot at minimum. On these old cars there is no liability to parts suppliers and no searches to pinpoint failure. There's no financial reason to do that. Even on your brake setup - If they are not factory parts or factory spec replacements there are no regulations or mandatory quality control for the stuff. By chosing to replace the factory parts the owner assumes liability. I'd bet my house that our legal system would take that view. I had a discussion years ago with the owner of from XV Motorsports about them using the Corvette knuckles on thier suspensions. I asked if he ever did failure analysis on them because the cars he was putting them under were heavier by a bit than the Corvettes they were designed for. His answer was that his engineer had looked at them and said they would be fine. But they never broke one to see where "fine" ended. That was too much money to be spent with little or no benefit in his eyes. Now over years I'd say he was proven right. Everyone in business has varying degrees of anticipated losses and the more complicated the product the greater the possibility of outside involvement ruining the product and giving the manufacturer and out. Everyone has the disclaimer of "installer error" on the second page of thier customer service line refeence notebook. Right after "This is the first we're hearing about it".