Do they come in black? I still need to read up on those uprights

Not sure if this is cheap, this is where i got my rear hub assemblies
https://www.ebay.com/itm/294245528976

 

Hard ano is like a grey/blackish color. In the right light his arms look like gold lol.

 

All the latest parts are black Type II now. I couldn't keep consistent results with the pewter so I had to change everything to black and find a new anodizing place.

And dont trust anyone hard anodizing (Type III) parts with cyclical loading. It has a dramatic effect on fatigue life for a given load. If a hard surface is needed, electroless nickel is the right thing to do but its not necessary for these. For reference, you can look at OEM aluminum suspension parts and the coatings they use (none or clear ano as far as I can tell).

 

I was just kidding. I don't mind bare or polished aluminum under there. I BBQ painted all the arms and knuckles hoping to slow the crappage from brake dust. I may try some peelable coating on those uprights when i get them

 

Unless you live in a state that salts during winter you don't need to worry about coating aluminum. It oxidizes fairly slow, billet parts oxidize even slower than cast too.

OEMs almost never coat aluminum parts, if they have a concern with corrosion they'll usually isolate parts with a drying liquid barrier or use a thick adhesive tape to keep things from getting too cozy.

 

What bugs me is the crusting of brake dust (street car issue). Sonax is awesome but still on the expensive side. I have Mag cleaner for bare aluminum.
BTW what's special about the intake manifold? it automatically has a polished look after spraying with Mag cleaner when I had it off the car. Not sure why people get these professionally cleaned lol

 

There's nothing special about the intake, Mitsu probably didn't cheap out on the casting cores which is why the surface finish isn't garbage looking like many OE cast aluminum parts tend to be. People are usually paying for cleaning to have the ports cleaned out on the inside. Since the runners aren't completely straight it's not really possible to clean them out manually and getting to the back of the plenum is also a pain unless you cut the plenum open.

 

ok i thought it was electroplated or something. I washed the insides clean but I didnt really pay attention how clean they got but wont dirty your fingers

 

I've had my eye on this, too. $99/year looks like a great deal, but I haven't looked into the limits much.

I've been using Fusion 360 for the past couple of years, but SolidWorks would still be my preference.

 

damn, sounds like a deal... I paid almost 10 K for my SW licece..

 

I started using Fusion 360 and its a better experience overall compared to SolidWorks. I havent recently used Solidworks but the last time I used it there were minimal changes. I will stick with Fusion 360 as its modern and uploads everything to the cloud. I still have trust issues with SolidWorks when it crashed on me multiple times at work.

 

I've use solidworks pretty much daily for almost 15 years and have use F360 since it came out because the CAM was just a league above anything within an order of magnitude of its price. I have 1000s of hours on F360 and 10s of thousands of hours on Solidworks.

Solidworks is the gold standard. I can cad all day long in it without frustration yet F360 just simple things like the way lines will snap but have no way to delete an automatic relation (cause it just doesnt appear) are constantly annoying. It takes me 2-3x as long to do anything in F360. I do all my core designs in solidworks but then once in fusion for CAM I do all the modifications when something needs adjusting or small details changes. I also make all my fixtures in F360 because it does better than SW with deleting features in a direct modeling kind of way.

 

I've used Fusion for over 5 years now, Creo for 2, NX for almost 2 and I've dabbled in Solidworks a bit over the years. I use Fusion for all my Wunderladen Racing parts, the license is cheap comparatively and there really isn't anything I find inadequate for my needs.

Fusion is good for simple parts (which is just about every aftermarket part out there), but doing more advanced modeling techniques can be very cumbersome. I recently discovered its model compare capability for doing overlays between different versions of parts which can be very helpful.

Creo was awesome for skeleton modeling and modeling from the top down, but that stuff is only feasible for small assemblies. It was also really good for family tabling parts so I could model one standardized part, like a rod end, and make a table of all the dimensions on it, then manipulate the dimensions in that table to spit out a different sized rod end. Saved tons of time not having to do repetitive modeling.

NX is basically the omega. It's what I use for my day job and was extremely foreign with lots of frustrations at first. There's at least 7 ways to do just about anything but only 1 or 2 is robust enough to handle changes further upstream. It feels like walking through a mirror maze and you just keep bumping into mirrors until eventually you're able to make it to the end. But after having a decent amount of time with it under my belt it's easy to see why most OEMs use it to model entire vehicles. There's basically no limit on what's possible and tons of high level modeling techniques are doable along with advanced functionalities.

Solidworks seemed fairly similar to Creo in my experience. The GUI was unique, but every CAD software is different in that regard. It's been a few years since I've really tooled around with it but I remember being able to pick it up and immediately do simple parts with it relatively easily. It sounds like they're trying to compete with Fusion in the hobbyist market by making a stripped down version available to the average consumer.

The one thing I will say I'm grateful for is having exposure to so many different CAD programs, it's helped me with coming up with better modeling techniques and do things in ways that save me time and effort that I wouldn't be aware of had I not used other softwares.

 

how much labor do you think a shop would charge for doing the rear uprights including assembling new rear hubs..?

 

standard hourly rate i would guess. It's 'easy' with a HF shop press(for hub-bearing-studs) and ball joint separator (or a hammer). An extra jack, 14mm offset box wrench for hub & whatever for swaybar links(not needed if both rear wheels are lifted), 22mm socket, impact gun/pliers for axle nut. you can do it!