I have a bit of experience with Troopers (a buddy liked them, and had two of them), and I would NEVER ever recommend that somebody buy one, particularly not as an off road vehicle. They can do it if they have to, but they are prone to break and underpowered in general.IrateIrishman wrote:Well I still stand by my recommendation of a second gen Trooper(although the info I posted in the comments on your blog were wrong concerning which diesels swap in).
A lot of people are under the misconception that stainless is harder than regular carbon steel, but in reality it is softer, and more difficult to make something of equivalent strength out of for this reason. People think it is harder because it work hardens easily when they try to drill or cut it, but this is entirely a localized effect limited to the immediate area where they are trying to work the material. Still, I wouldn't want to make critical structural pieces out of it for these reasons, unless I knew exactly what I was doing (I don't). Chris, as an engineer, has a much better chance of working around these drawbacks. For general bumpers, winch mounts, and trail armor it is really hard to beat plain old carbon steel, both from a functional perspective, and relative ease of fabrication. Plus, there is plenty of prior art out there, and from reading the various off road forums you can get a good idea of what is strong enough. Most companies that make bumper and armor will publish the thickness of their parts in their marketing material, and you can leech off their experience as well.Also I don't know about stainless for bumpers and winch mounts. It seems like it would be a bit hard and brittle for that use(pretty sure there is a reason chro-moly is used for cages and chassis on race cars). There are almost chrome like powder coatings that could be used however.
Some of the more extreme rock crawling types are beginning to use 6061 aluminum in thick sections for bumpers and skids. This can save a lot of weight, but it is still very much a niche proposition, and requires a lot more knowledge and specialized equipment. I'm not sure what, if anything, they are doing about the loss of temper in the heat affected zone of their welds. It's possible that they are forming their parts from "0" condition material and then heat treating afterwards, but I kind of doubt that they are. We did a little bit of heat treating aluminum in A&P school, and it is pretty involved, and not exactly a safe process, particularly on a smaller scale.
