mancini tube upper control arm failure....
Did anyone wonder if maybe the wheel made contact with the curb then the whole front end corner with a tree before the tube broke.....not calling anyone a liar but damn, that front end took a vicious hit....look at how bad the wheel is bent and look at the damage to the corner of the radiator support and front frame member.
Could something else have happened before to cause the accident that may have caused the weld to break? Like a blowout?........just another way to look at it.
I mean I bet the whole accident took about 5 seconds so what happened first? Chicken or egg?
An even better point! I think we all assumed the A-arm broke first, but based on the info we have we really don't know. Further, on re-reading the info, he said
BOTH UCA's broke.
No way, no how do
both UCA's break at the
same welds at the
same time just driving down the street. If both arms truly broke at the welds, that damage was caused when that thing pounded the curb at 45mph. Try that with your stock components and see if they hold up.
It does point to the weld being the weakest link. But for a A-arm to hold a ball joint like the Mopar's you end up with a thin wall tube welded to a thicker ball joint socket. Given the short section of tubing, its not surprising to me for the weld to be the weak link. Typically in engineering applications welds are evaluated at 80-90% of the strength of the materials used. In an application with a longer tube, it would make sense for the tube to bend first. But with a short section of tube, and a very short, sharp impulse, (pounding into a cement curb) the joints take the hardest hit because they take the force basically in shear. The rims hit the curb and they stopped. The car kept going, maxing out the suspension. With the wheel and the spindle stopped, the A-arms hit max travel and stop, and then all the force goes to the a-arms and the a-arm mounts, something has to give. Its too bad we can't see the A-arm mounts on the frame.
At this point, I'm not sure any of us can make any claims. Its pretty obvious we don't have enough details to figure out what happened first. We're all jumping to conclusions based on a few fuzzy pictures and a very short description of events.
