Spidertrax | Thom Kingston | CC BY 3.0
Heat treating has become commonplace in our shop these days. The continued push for stronger and faster Ultra4 vehicles demands it, and in terms of “engineering porn” heat treating is about as good as it gets. Only problem is maintaining high tolerances in parts, like the Spidertrax 2-piece axle shaft yoke shown here, which after heat treating will often be sized incorrectly.
So, post heat treat machining gets added to the mix on nearly all heat treated parts. For our 2-piece axle shaft, this means boring both top and bottom ears in one single pass AFTER heat treatment, holding a hole tolerance of 0.0005″ (a single hair measures roughly 3 times that amount, 0.0015″ thick, to put things into perspective) while maintaining concentricity between both top and bottom holes. It’s a time killer, but ensures every part is tolerances exactly as we intend.
Over a hundred Ultimate Unit Bearings are making their way to our assembly bench today. It’s a time-consuming process, involving a careful blend of skill and patience, but the end result is well worth the effort. Shown here is our fully heat-treated chromoly spindle awaiting its press fitment with a genuine Timken 1 ton unit pack. We seem to be selling these faster than we can put on the shelf, so if you have your eyes on the Ultimate Unit Bearing consider getting your order in ahead of time. We don’t charge until we ship (that’s the same policy as everything we sell), so you can secure your place in line without spending a dime. That’s it for today, back to work we go.
And on a related note, we’ll be closed today and tomorrow for Independence Day. Have a great holiday weekend!
While we’re always machining multiple products at a time, today feels like an axle shaft kind of day. We batch all order’s in the previous month, and start machining those orders in the first week of the following month. This week is that week, and it’s going to be busy.
Our most popular shafts can be found at http://www.spidertrax.com/products/Axle-Shafts , but it’s worth noting we make many applications beyond this. This month includes some of those, like 40 splined full floater axle shafts. If you’re after an axle shaft not shown in our store, give us a call and we’ll be happy to help.
Pictured here is one of our 35 spline 300M axle shafts, which will be turned down and splined prior to heat-treat. After which, it will be normalized, snap tempered, cryogenically treated, and double tempered to the strictest SAE standards. All of this takes time, but it’s well worth the investment if you’re racing against the best of the best. That’s our story for the day, back to work we go.
