Pillow ball top mount destructive testing

So, naturally, after all of our hard work developing and getting the Pillow ball top mounts into production, the first thing we did with our nice shiny new units was destroy one!

We knew our prototype units were strong enough, but had to ensure that the units we had made were up to spec.

First off were the spherical bearings units;

On our first attempt, as you can see, our favorite socket broke before the bearing gave way. D'oh! That was at around 3 tonnes, so it didn't do too badly. God rest it's soul!

Another attempt with a more solid set up managed to begin deforming the outer race at 3.5 tonnes, way above what we expect to see in the Astra strut tower!

So, we know the bearings are well upto the task, but how would the housings perform?

We set back up in the press with a fresh spherical bearing to press on the abutment face. We wanted as true-to-life of a reading as we could get, so best to use the real hardware.

Bringing the press up to pressure slowly, we soon reached the 3.5 tonne limit of the bearing, and began deforming this one too. So the housings are easily strong enough just based on this.

Not being happy with stopping there though, we began pushing on the bearings outer race.

The pressure gauge wound up and up, until eventually yielding at just over 9.5 tonnes!

We are over the moon with these results, as they are far in excess of what our original stress analysis data told us, and that was in excess of what we needed!

So to summarize our results, these are absolutely solid!