custom wishbone strong enough?

Well, I am a total lay person, but the wishbone itself looks easily strong enough for the job. I would be a bit more concerned about rotational forces (from braking) trying to bend the studding connecting the rose joint to the wishbone.

like scruff posted is the correct way to do it. i would always use a male rose joint fitted into a threaded tube rather than using plate like you have, the shear forces are very concentrated in your setup.

or like ive just done my rear upper one-

problem is my shock absorber clearances i only got enough room for a bolt head on the back, i did think about making the threaded portion longer but wouldnt get the shortness i needed as the rose needs to come right up against the wishbone like this



to minimise stress on the threaded portion i sunk it into that metal plate





I'm goin home this weekend to grab my smaller shocks if i can make new mounts for these and the short enough i should be able too extend the threaded portion, also i will be using high tensile bolts instead off threaded bar, if i can eliminate the shock being in the way i can run a support through the middle also. more thoughts on that please?

i get you now, yeah that makes way more sense, I'm ordering two male ends now, cheers guys

where did you get your roses from? i can on find suppliers that will do up to a 35mm threaded portion, do they come any longer than this? its M14 cheers

You shouldn't need any more than 35mm threaded portion of the rod-end at all (in fact you shouldn't even need the full 35mm). The idea of using the male rod-end would be to make a longer wishbone that the male rod-end screwed strait into.

The point of this is that the rod-end is placed under a bending load when you brake, which is something rod ends aren't really designed to do. The less the rod-end sticks out, the less the leverage there is on it, and therefore the less the bending load is.

As phillipm says, the ideal solution would be to use a spherical joint rather than a rod-end at all, that way you eliminate all the bending loads, and only have a fully triangulated wishbone, with everything in tension and compression. You don't need to have adjustment in the wishbone anyway, as the camber can be much more securely adjusted by shimming the mounts to the front cross-member. If you really do want to use a rod-end, make it so it's screwed very nearly all the way in.

The strength of the rest of it looks fine though.

Looks more than strong enough, there's a few unstressed areas that could be cut down or radiused to shave a fair bit of weight off it though.

Is there anything stopping you from running the rose joint above the hub rather than under it? It looks like it'd give much more favorable geometry that way.

Looking good.
I assume that the joint is under to give a lower ride height?
Is that camber right too or jsut a trial? Looks like you are out of -ve adjustment?

It would alter the geometry, but whether or not it'd mess it up is dependant on what you want from it. In almost all cases some increase in camber through the travel is a good thing, so as to help keep the wheels parallel to the road when the body's rolling during cornering. If you were to mount it to the top of the hub then it looks like it'd give you a reasonable amount of camber increase, where as at the moment you'll get little or none during the immediate travel. How much you want 'ideally' could be discussed for days, but generally an estimated reasonable amount will be better than none at all.

My only concern with that set-up would be that with it mounted above the rose joint looks like it may not have enough articulation in it to give you full travel, so it may not actually be possible anyway. You'd have to extend the arm a bit to get your camber at ride height back to a sensible amount, but I'm guessing that the wishbone is threaded, so the half nut could be moved to the outside of the wishbone to easily achieve this.


Of course if you're planning on running air-ride/hydraulics then ignore me, as you'll probably want unchanging camber so it stays correct at different ride heights.