Spidertrax | Thom Kingston | CC BY 3.0

This month’s axle shaft run is another “big one”, so were finding ourselves getting an early start to stay ahead. I caught a small portion of those shafts starting to make their way into our shipping container for heat-treat, pictured here, and was reminded of two things that I wanted to share.

The first item that came to mind was a blog post we did back in January of 2009 regarding the heat treating of the Rock Bug Spider 9 housing. That original blog post can be found at http://blog.spidertrax.com/2009/01/14/heat-treating-a-spider-9-housing/ -or- http://wp.me/pCSYo-3t for the shorter url. Nearly lost my eye sight shooting that video, specifically due to the brightness of the Spider 9 housing as it left the furnace during Normalizing, but that post is still one of my favorites! A great read if you missed that one years ago, and after reading that post over myself I came to the second thing I wanted to share.

Our heat treating has come A LONG WAY from the early days. We’ve always prided ourselves on making great product, but the level of detail that goes into our axle shafts now is far beyond anything we could have imagined in the past. Specifically on our front & rear 300M axle shafts, we strictly follow one of the staple Aerospace heat treating standards in the industry, otherwise known as AMS2759/2F . Our 300M axles pictured here will be vacuum quenched, double tempered, snap tempered, and cryogenically treated. Every process carefully controlled, following that Aerospace standard with the tightest of standards.

Off-roading is serious business these days, with no place for compromised design & manufacturing.  Following this level of detail is what allows today’s racers to do what they do. Pull up an old Big Rock video from the early ARCA days and you’ll know what we mean when we say, things have progressed a bit in our sport :) .

With that, back to work we go.