6pm-2am in the shop on my birthday with the result of a heim joint shearing and taking the rest of the rod ends on the front right corner with it as it failed during a low speed turn. Am I having fun yet?
Today made a new link (luckily they are dead simple to make, unlike A-arms and we only needed one) and replaced all the heim joints on that corner. Then took the car out 10pm tonight and it ran a bit, turned a corner successfully only to have some intermittent elecrical problems which could result in 170 pounds of burning Lithium. More fun that last night because it's not my problem.
We are thinking it was the apes assembling the car that would periodically step on the links, use the threads of the heim joints in bending to support the car on the table, and overarticulating them. Every time I saw that I would chew them out but I couldn't be there all the time. I hate to say I told you so but those were designed to be 2 force members and bending was not one of those forces!
Luckily we tend to be nocturnal so no one was around to see it fail at 1:30 in the morning. And the car is quiet so no one woke up to see what was going on. The failure happened at relatively slow speed. The forces going through the links were nowhere near the tensile breaking point, and it failed with a clean break- shear, no necking or bulging from too much tension or compression. So we think rough handling caused a notch that fatigued the link until it went last night.