Tubular upper arms-I feel lucky tonight

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have run tubular a arms for years in stock car racing, thru all the worst punishment imaginable, yes we have had failures, but at 100 mphs you clip the guy while passing or been passed, we carried spares for a reason, tubular a arms arent the issue the quality of the piece is, saw my buddy pile a brand new car into the wall at better than 110 when the weld broke on the upper control arm, the issue on the failure that everyone is discussing here is nothing more than a cold weld, someone that doesnt know how to or failed quality inspection, upper and lower tubular a arms are the way to go, no if no buts no maybe,

if your driving your grandkids around, you probably dont need them, if your going to throw the thing into a corner at high g's, you better damn well have them.....
Dodge29

ps, in the infamous word of Dennis Miller, my opinion I could be wrong.....

but I know better
 
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a year ago my daughter jump the berm in the family open wheel modified at better than 80 mphs, she smacked the wall hard, she folded the right front horn over the side of the engine, destroyed both upper and lower control arms, both twisted and mangle, none of the welds broke, as you can see, no gussets in the top one......tubular is the way to go, always, if your chasing serious performance and handling, leave the stock stuff for parade and sundays drive.....by the way, these upper are 60 bucks a piece, we carried both left and right side complete, assembled and ready to bolt in....
Dodge29
 
72bluNblu...thankyou kindly for that high quality reply to my photo post, i appreciate your scrutiny of the pics and obvious expertise in the area. I think, going on your opinion plus my own intuition (based on the fact that these arms were manufactured over 6 years ago) that these arms should be ok to use.

I am also impressed with Dodge29's contribution - what his family has put their front ends through on the track is worth a thousand words. All said and done, he has proven that they are plenty strong enough in very harsh conditions and the CAP arms that failed were due to nothing more than a poorly welded item/poor quality control. Thanks
 
omg!so glad no one was hurt!.O.OThat wouldve been a hugee lawsuit.What poor quality on a such a important part.

CAP huh??
There should really be an "R" between the "C" and the "A".
 
Ray at CAP told me they where only second pair to fail.Told me he was sorry and made no excuses.He did give me back money for arms.but i still had money in alignment and installation so i lost out because of a bad weld.At least i wasn't rolling,i guess it could have been a lot worst.I do know that stock arms are going back on.That's the only way i could drive car and feel secure.
 
wow glad your safe! a while back this happened on a b-body i believe and he wasnt so lucky. i think he was fine but the car sure wasnt. i think i will stick with stock or at least one piece control arms
 
[LEFT said:
demonjohn[/LEFT];920692]Ray at CAP told me they where only second pair to fail.Told me he was sorry and made no excuses.He did give me back money for arms.but i still had money in alignment and installation so i lost out because of a bad weld.At least i wasn't rolling,i guess it could have been a lot worst.I do know that stock arms are going back on.That's the only way i could drive car and feel secure.
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Not much considering you could have gotten killed, But I guess you have your lucky stars to thank. I am curious as to if those arms are CM and if they were mig welded, mig welded Cm can suffer weld embrittlement if not stress relived afterwards. If you look at that pic you can see how the weld looks crystallized where it broke.
 
Glad to hear you got your money back. That's better than what they did for another member on the board that bought a junk K-frame from him. But IMO don't judge all the apples by this one bad apple. I have known guys run other brands for yrs. without any problem at all. Seems like every time I see a post pop up like this it's a CAP product.
 
Racingduster said:
What do you mean "front wheel and tire combo"? Is there something that I'm missing? just wondering
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With a standard Mopar disk set up and Tbars, the only advantage to the tubular uppers is more caster adjustment and possibly somewhat lighter.

IF going with a coil over suspension, the tubulars more easily clear the coilover shock assembly. But say coil overs, and the BIG "you can't do it because of loads into the inner fender" thread will start.

IMHO: if you properly engineer, plan and execute a mod, it will most likely work as designed. Cobble together a bunch of aftermarket parts for a "cool" look without knowing how one piece affect the other, is asking for trouble. ALSO: you need to research and find stellar references for parts you may use.

For my coil over mod, I'm using RMS tubular uppers, QA1 coilovers, modified and braced stock LCAs and US Cartool inner fender reinforcement kit.
 
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