Quote:
Originally Posted by BlackZeda
You definitely have confirmed some of my suspicions/instincts and helped me resist the hype...thanks! Just from experience with mountain bike parts and golf clubs I will always choose a forged part over something that has just been cast and cut out. With mountain bike parts the later will just fail, and with golf clubs you really get no feeling (and I have broken a few cast golf club heads). I tried many, many clubs last year and have come to the conclusion that I will probably never give up my Mizunos which are forged.
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I'm no metallurgist, but the problem as I understand it is that the billets used are part of an extrusion. As such, the grain is completely uniform. The items machined from billet therefore have the grain always running in the same direction. This is problematic in that it means that in many areas the stresses imposed run
across the grain, meaning weaker. They compensate for this by making the items thicker (heavier), but that is apparently tricky to do (knowing where the stress risers are going to be) and if it's not done perfectly, you get stress cracks fairly often. If it is done properly, you are left with a rigid but heavier item. With forgings, the metal is literally hammered into shape around the curves and bends in stress areas, meaning the stresses run with the grain, meaning stronger.
Before I'd pay extra for a billet lower or upper and suffer the extra weight, somebody would have to prove to me that a more rigid shooting platform will translate into me getting more shots into an 8 inch circle from 50 yards, and that I won't get cracking of the part after another 4000-5000 rounds. I made that assumption years ago, but current wisdom recommends against, and indeed, I haven't seen that at all shooting my Noveske with VIS compared to my SBRs with conventional Noveske uppers/lowers.
Hype IMHO.
Relative to the LPK, it's kind of cumbersome to buy the individual parts, but IMHO works better. Plus, I usually order 3-5 of each spring and detent just to have them on hand. Here's a representation:
