DOES THE HDK SUSPENSION K-MEMBER HANDLE BETTER THAN A T-BAR SUSPENSION?
I have seen spot welds fail on K's and as you mentioned you have seen them pop in other areas also. I challenge anyone to show me a failed weld on any HDK product. I have had pieces bend, but never a failed weld. I think Mopars K-frame was / is a great design for its intended purpose....but to claim it is a better / stronger piece than a product (HDK) with ZERO failures is where I gotta call BS.
................AO Smith was the sub contactor who very likely got the bid by guess what main factor?.....being the cheapest. Good or bad, just the way it was.
Spoiler alert for those with fragile mindsets, at the risk of being labeled "argumentative", let me counter the above, as member HemiDenny seems to have sufficiently thick skin in these discussions (that is a compliment?):
1. There were millions and millions of Mopar K members built over decades. I submit no other current manufacturer of aftermarket k frames has built enough combined to be in the 1 of x number of failures people have mentioned about OEM k member failures. Consider if 20,000,000 mopar K members (a wild guess) were built, and their failure rate was .01%, statistically they would have to build on average 20,000 before a single spot weld failure
2. Spot welding can be a very suitable weld for the intended application
3. Maybe 90%? of a Unibody car is spot welded
4. Spot welds are prone to corrosion because of adjacent gaps allows water, salt, etc to act over time
5. Spot welds are very difficult to quality control visually
6. Anything built on a production line can result in numerous repeated errors by a single worker that may take years to discover (Max 737 door plugs?)
7. There are millions of OEM K frames that never failed over billions of miles
8. We have no real understanding of what abuse any OEM K members that failed might have suffered
9. Not sure if any "failed" weld OEM K members contributed to any accidents or worse
10. It seems the K member spot welds were manually made and almost random in number/location, and that begs the question, were the failed OEM K members a result of missing or misplaced spot welds and not any design or process shortcoming?
Taking all the above into account, I have yet accept there is a stronger aftermarket K member on the market than an OEM, accepting the verdict is still out on the Morrison, IMO.
Additionally, Every design will fail at some point, due to process (OEM poor spot welds?), design (Gerst?) or abuse like running into a ditch (RMS?)
Sorry I can't accept what I have seen to call anything "stronger" than an OEM K member yet. I'll ignore BS comment.
HemiDenny, everything indicates, you take great pride in your product, you have passion for your craft, you have a great following, you have a satisfied customer base over a number of years, you are open minded enough to publicly discuss the topic online (nobody else is it seems), and you are not thin skinned (yet? lol).
