Hi everyone, I recently had a boom car failure wherein one corner of an end cap fractured off, allowing the delrin balls to escape from that side of the car. Then, of course, the car parted company with the boom track/rail. Upon
inspection of the broken end cap, I could see that there was a cavity in the aluminium casting which obviously created a structural weak point. The main body of the car is fine and I have tracked down replacement ends at Rig-Rite in the US. (Whilst these ends are supposedly made of cast aluminium, there must be some gold in there as well as they cost USD39.00 each - and maybe some lead too, as the freight to the
east coast of
Australia is being charged at USD55.00!*). The standard recirculating ball replacement is 1/4" delrin balls. I'm thinking about going to torlon instead. I know that torlon is dearer, but it seems to beat delrin on all the performance criteria. I also note that some boom car set-ups use torlon rods instead of balls. Any thoughts, opinions,
advice, warnings or otherwise out there?
*All jokes aside, these 2 end caps together would fit in the smallest available padded envelope and weigh a total of 70 grams! A while ago, I ordered 4 full sets of zinc collar/cone anodes from BoatZincs (also in the US), weighing nearly 3 kgs and paid less freight - go figure!