Powder Coated or Chromed Rebar Springer

by Mike

I was considering building a springer front end and thought some powder coated or chromed rebar would look good but not sure its strong enough for the stress. what is your recommendation?

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Aug 17, 2013
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Soft Steel
by: Anonymous

Rebar is just carbon steel, it's very soft and will bend when under a load. This is a dangerous idea...
Real upper fork tubes are hardened steel and hardened again with chrome plating. When you have idea's like this it's always best to run by a few guys and get others opinions and maybe even build a full day mock up so even you can find out where the weaknesses will be in the structure...
I'd rather spend all day Saturday in the garage, (welding, performing tests and trying to make it work) then out on the road being zipped up in a body bag. I think if I were you I'd just give up on this one.

Aug 16, 2013
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That Would Look Good But Here's The Problem!
by: Custom-Choppers-Guide.com

I think powder coated chrome rebar would look sweet but I worry about it's strength. The cross section of the tube is what you want to look at when comparing the strength of two pieces of metal. A hollow tube that is 1" round even with thin walls is sometimes stronger than a small diameter solid rod, even though the solid rod has more material and weight. If you are thinking about using a very heavy duty rebar that is a significant diameter then it would be fine, but it would be pretty heavy. This has to do with the section modulus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_modulus

Here's a quick example:

Tube is very thin walled 1/16" and 1" diameter while the rod on the right is 1/2" solid. The red shows that the 1/2" rod deforms more than the thin walled tube.