prepmech
Observer
A few weekends ago I was playing on some rocks at the Badlands offroad park in Attica, IN and managed to break one of the shafts in the Ford 9" axle I've got under my jeep. I hit them pretty hard and it bounced the jeep pretty good, I knew I was in trouble even before the tire hit the ground and I heard the snap.
Here is a picture of the rocks I was on, this one from back in 2005. I've played on them dozens of time without any troubles, and most of those times were on the stock axles:
Well, at first I found a broken shaft, no big deal...
Then as I dug deeper I found that the remaining piece was wedged in the Detroit locker, and that the case was damaged:
I'm putting another Detroit in it, and keeping the old one for parts. I am also upgrading to alloy shafts, which I should have done in the first place. That is one of the last weak links to fix in order to keep it off the trailer, and start driving it to the trails.
I also managed to scrape up my daytona pinion support pretty good (the purple thing):
So I figured while I had it all apart I might as well try powdercoating it:
I used a color called "almost chrome" to try and get it looking like polished aluminum. It turned out pretty good for my first attempt. Not counting time in the oven it took me around 20 min. to sandblast, clean, and powdercoat it. There are a few casting marks I could have cleaned up, but it looks great for someting that is going to be under the jeep. I'm hooked, now I want to do everything on the jeep.
I've had the equipment for quite a while now, and kicking myself for not using it sooner. Powdercoating is a great option for items that are going to be abused (pretty much everything on my jeep) because it is so tough. I have a spare set of knuckles and caliper mounts that I'm going to coat once I figure out what color to do them. I've got a translucent purple that matches the pinion support. I was thinking about doing the knuckles and brake calipers purple and the brake caliper mount chrome. It would end up looking quite a bit like the knuckles on my HPI Savage RC truck. I've spent quite a bit of time customizing bikes and am a firm believer of not having matching colors touching.
What do you think, would the knuckles look cool purple, or am I just kidding myself and the color is really pink which would look rediculous on my jeep?
Here is a picture of the rocks I was on, this one from back in 2005. I've played on them dozens of time without any troubles, and most of those times were on the stock axles:
Well, at first I found a broken shaft, no big deal...
Then as I dug deeper I found that the remaining piece was wedged in the Detroit locker, and that the case was damaged:
I'm putting another Detroit in it, and keeping the old one for parts. I am also upgrading to alloy shafts, which I should have done in the first place. That is one of the last weak links to fix in order to keep it off the trailer, and start driving it to the trails.
I also managed to scrape up my daytona pinion support pretty good (the purple thing):
So I figured while I had it all apart I might as well try powdercoating it:
I used a color called "almost chrome" to try and get it looking like polished aluminum. It turned out pretty good for my first attempt. Not counting time in the oven it took me around 20 min. to sandblast, clean, and powdercoat it. There are a few casting marks I could have cleaned up, but it looks great for someting that is going to be under the jeep. I'm hooked, now I want to do everything on the jeep.
I've had the equipment for quite a while now, and kicking myself for not using it sooner. Powdercoating is a great option for items that are going to be abused (pretty much everything on my jeep) because it is so tough. I have a spare set of knuckles and caliper mounts that I'm going to coat once I figure out what color to do them. I've got a translucent purple that matches the pinion support. I was thinking about doing the knuckles and brake calipers purple and the brake caliper mount chrome. It would end up looking quite a bit like the knuckles on my HPI Savage RC truck. I've spent quite a bit of time customizing bikes and am a firm believer of not having matching colors touching.
What do you think, would the knuckles look cool purple, or am I just kidding myself and the color is really pink which would look rediculous on my jeep?
