I'm missing something somewhere - Johnny Joints look like the same joints that Teraflex uses, appear to be the same components - even the rebuild kits look exactly the same - is the difference in the Urethane surrounding the ball centers?
Currie has a patent on their joints. The TeraFlex and just about any other the other gold colored joints have subtle difference. Material used, angle of the shank and most importantly, quality control. The later is where TeraFlex misses the boat or, maybe I should say, has a problem because their joints come over on a boat. For whatever reason, I have personally had and see TeraFlex joints blow all the time.
I don't disagree, just saying, you gave your Johnny joints 60K to prove themselves....I guess someone needs to bite the bullet and put metalcloak through their paces and see whats what.
To be clear, 60,000 miles with coil overs that offer 14" of vertical travel. I'm not sure how many miles are on EVO 1 but they've been running the same Johnny Joints for over 3 years now and have been racing it in Ultra4 events. Mel and I were talking about how much of a beating they've taken and seem to work only better with time and punishment.
Having said that, do you think that Metalcloak is going after the currie customer? It seems like they are going after the major (by major I mean numbers, not quality) manufacturers.
Actually, I found it odd that rather then come up with something new and original, Metalcloak copied the Johnny Joint to the point where you can use it as a direct replacement in a Johnny Joint housing. Needless to say, this leaves the actually joint smaller by comparison and being that the rubber isn't bonded to a pressed in metal collar like a Clevite or greasable like a Johnny Joint, it's left to rub itself apart as it rotates inside of the joint housing.
Hopefully you'll come across someone that's running the metalcloak arms and can check out how they do.
Like I said, time will tell. From the tests we did, I'm not putting my money on them.
I must say though, marketing or not, I think their shocks are pretty cool and a brilliant idea.
:cheesy: Please, they just took two shocks and strapped them together. If I recall, a company called Ortech came out with something similar a few years before Metalcloak - they just sucked at marketing. What's even funnier is that EVO posted up a thread about it on FB a few weeks back and had so many people who had them talk about all the problems they had, the owner of Metalcloak was forced to come on pretending to be a regular Joe to defend them. For the money, I would still put mine on coil overs - I like proven technology, not gimmicks and good marketing. But, that's just me. :yup:
