Forging Aluminum? What's the process?

[Purevil]

The Evo5 uses an forged aluminum arm similar to ours. They can be found on ebay.uk or lancerregister.com in the classifieds. The Evo 5 was the first year they used a widebody so the dimensions may not be the same, but its something to think about.

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[DanaT]

Forging is incredibly expensive. I think the $30K tooling above is a low ball estimate. Small plastic injection molds can run $30-$50K.

But the reason behind forging (in a very simplified manner) is that it makes the grains smaller in the metal. Making grains smaller make dislocations harder to move and have higher grain boundary energy. Going back to simple, its it one way to make a part stronger while making it more ductile (these two objectives are hard to achieve).

The cost of making forged control arms on a small budget is prohibative. You are better having titanium one machined as it would be significantly cheaper (and titanium is much cooler than aluminum).

-Dana

 

[tkelly27]

Getting an aluminum die to cast a close shape could help to lower the cost of having one CNC machined. It wouldn't be as strong, requiring more material to keep it from flexing/failing, and thusly being heavier, but it could still be lighter than stock.

A cast/machined set of steering knuckles would be pretty sweet.