How many miles have you racked up?
#11
12-10-2008, 10:54 AM
Champion
#12
12-10-2008, 01:21 PM
King Jackass
#13
12-10-2008, 01:32 PM
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Someone at Chrysler needs to have several balljoints stuffed up their a$$hole for letting this slide into a new generation of trucks already infamous for front end problems. Every time I change my oil I push and pull as hard as I can to see if they're starting to wiggle, so far so good...
#15
12-10-2008, 06:41 PM
Record Breaker
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#19
12-10-2008, 08:05 PM
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#20
12-10-2008, 08:51 PM
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21K is early for balljoints...
Everything related to "Dodge Front Ends are ShT"..."Dodge Automatics are ShT"... is to blame on bean counters; engineers are trained to want to make stuff 4x stronger/better than it has to be. They then take their proposals to managers and purchasing teams, and get told to come back when it costs 35% less. Then they hit the test lab and the stats book, and whittle parts down until they barely survive. Often times, well beyond the point that conservative calculations say **STOP!** Not my style. I encountered this same issue at my first job, working as a chassis/transmission designer for a major lawn and forestry equipment manufacturer...if a certain percentage of parts make their warranty life, mission accomplished. Even if the threshold is well below industry standards. Even if that warranty is 250 hours for a "Professional Grade" unit. Or 36,000 miles for a pickup truck. Sheesh.
Granted, probability guarantees a certain number of components will simply fail. But good engineering gets that percentage down around the order of 3 per hundred thousand or better. True "6 Sigma" processes, patented by Motorola in the 80's and embraced by all major manufacturers (supposedly) should hold failures per component (not necessarily per truck) to 3.4 per *million*. That's 99.9997% "GOOD" parts!!!!! Dodge sold about 50,000 Dakotas last year...I'd say alot more than 0.17 trucks had bad balljoints.
**Clarification** - When I say "failures per truck" I mean the compounded chance that any one part will fail. Since there are thousands of parts on a vehicle, one or two replacements or failures per hundred vehicles may actually be statistically expected. But when you have the same component failing over and over, that's a problem.
Everything related to "Dodge Front Ends are ShT"..."Dodge Automatics are ShT"... is to blame on bean counters; engineers are trained to want to make stuff 4x stronger/better than it has to be. They then take their proposals to managers and purchasing teams, and get told to come back when it costs 35% less. Then they hit the test lab and the stats book, and whittle parts down until they barely survive. Often times, well beyond the point that conservative calculations say **STOP!** Not my style. I encountered this same issue at my first job, working as a chassis/transmission designer for a major lawn and forestry equipment manufacturer...if a certain percentage of parts make their warranty life, mission accomplished. Even if the threshold is well below industry standards. Even if that warranty is 250 hours for a "Professional Grade" unit. Or 36,000 miles for a pickup truck. Sheesh.
Granted, probability guarantees a certain number of components will simply fail. But good engineering gets that percentage down around the order of 3 per hundred thousand or better. True "6 Sigma" processes, patented by Motorola in the 80's and embraced by all major manufacturers (supposedly) should hold failures per component (not necessarily per truck) to 3.4 per *million*. That's 99.9997% "GOOD" parts!!!!! Dodge sold about 50,000 Dakotas last year...I'd say alot more than 0.17 trucks had bad balljoints.
**Clarification** - When I say "failures per truck" I mean the compounded chance that any one part will fail. Since there are thousands of parts on a vehicle, one or two replacements or failures per hundred vehicles may actually be statistically expected. But when you have the same component failing over and over, that's a problem.
Last edited by cramerica; 12-10-2008 at 08:55 PM.