Oh, the bolt is blue? Never mind, carry on. Mods can you delete my post, we've got a blue bolt here problem solved.

 

Never mind the magic blue stuff. If you're gonna use/reuse nyloc nuts instead of castle nuts, keep an eye on the prevailing torque. Not sure I'd trust my life to nyloc.

 

Serious question, why the threads cut down on the one end of the blue bolt?

 

Presumably to use as wrench flats to get approximately equal thread engagement on both sides.

 

​​​​​​SPL recommends 50 ft/lb for their nyloc nuts.

 

Prevailing torque is the resistance of the fastener to being run down prior to it clamping, AKA the nylon on the nyloc binding on the thread of the bolt. If you end up chewing up the nylon and then reusing the nut, you won't have a locking feature any more.

 

As bad of an idea as the nylock nuts are, that ranks down at about 5th or 6th place for "bad ideas" that went into those arms.

 

How many bad ideas?
#ALLOFTHEM

 

Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. Maybe the only part of this that does.

 

Here I am chuckling like an idiot at work because of the blue threaded rod picture. This whole thread kinda feels like trolling to me.

 

#BLUEBOLTSMATTER

 

Thread from the dead update. Same issue as before, this time using the blue threaded rod...I guess the color of the threaded rod didn't matter.


This is after maybe 10 events on the car, the car is not street driven anymore. So in total, maybe only a dozen or so hours of track time on the replacement parts they sent me the first time. SPL is now sending me more blue bolts and aluminum bushings. The engineer I spoke with at SPL (really nice guy btw) is/has been pushing for a new arm design, they no longer sell this upper control arm on their site, but it's still being sold on other sites.


The video below is the driver side rear, the passenger side has less play (obviously), but has also failed again.




TLDR
The arms are trash, the design is trash, mt.net was correct. I'll be buying new upper control arms this winter.

 

New threaded rod and aluminum bushings from SPL have arrived, swapping parts. Unfortunately the arms I wanted to buy are on back order so I have to run these for a few more months.




Collection of failed SPL parts, I have 2 more bushings to add to this line up.

 

The journey is complete, finally ponied up and bought better arms. Pacomotorsports arms with Energy poly bushings.




SPL junk in the trash...

https://imgur.com/K2RT6Bw


https://imgur.com/EJQdLOa