DOES THE HDK SUSPENSION K-MEMBER HANDLE BETTER THAN A T-BAR SUSPENSION?

Think about how much the factory does everything the quickest/cheapest way possible and then compare that to something you'd spend several thousand on. A failure on a stick welded, potentially by someone who was hungover, drunk, or high, while given mere seconds to do the task after 40-50 years, not going to say that surprises me. The QC on really any old car is pretty bad. The design itself is solid because more K-frames made it than broke even after 50 years. I have seen ones with the LCA tubes broken out also.

Frankly, I am unimpressed even if they increased the tubing thickness because the joining of a bent piece of round tube to a flat tube like that without anything to spread the load out isn't a great design. The area where there is actually a weld is the smallest possible. The HDK and AlterKtion have this done MUCH better, though all can be improved by gussets and triangulation to spread the load out. I wouldn't say any one of these is even remotely optimized for stiffness or has a super fantastic overall design. To me it's a bit of a shock in a world where we have all these incredible modern cars to look at at everyone is still doing Mustang II (read Pinto) front ends?

There are a lot of frankly horrible designs out there for k-members for a lot of different cars. For Mopars the Magnumforce, CAP, and Gerst ones are all garbage, and the QA1 has bascially the same design again. I certainly don't like the Ford Fox Body BMR, QA1, Team Z, or AJE ones. Frankly a lot of these have such a flimsy design I can't believe they would even hold up on the street, even without big tires.

It seems QA1 at least uses certified welders to do the welding which I'm sure helps but I question really their engineering if they did wall thickness and whatnot and didn't just go all out on actually improving the design. I'm glad they are trying to help the people out, but I still wonder if we won't see failures of their parts 5-10 years down the road too because the design is subpar. Guess we will find out.