Integrity inspection for factory riders parts?

They use a penetrant dye inspection for aluminum I'm sure ShOWA does that I would be highly surprised if HEP or any Factory do their own test except for their Billet stuff !There are pictures online showing how ragged  the Hep suspension looks being a low budget team from Ken's forklugs  to Shane's shock bodies! Ken says there was only 3 hours on the shock but doesn't mention if that is form rebuild or from new🤷‍♂️

Aren't they using hand me down stuff from the old Yosh team as far as suspension?

I wonder what the internal pressure reaches on a full compression hard hit like Kenny's?

I’d be interested to know what the life cycle time is for suspension for a team like for hep , and how it compares to a full factory effort 

If the failure was caused by too high an internal pressure, the bladder's chamber cap may have blown out, or the shock body may have split.

If the failure was caused by bottoming, the rubber stopper may have fully compressed, and the end plate may have been damaged.

Hard to tell from Kenny's description what happened, I hope there are photos in pit bits!

The common method used by teams to measure front suspension position is a cable activated potentiometer, it's vulnerable so isn't typically use in races...

Kawasaki has been measuring front suspension pressure with a sensor attached to the fork's bleed screw, it is used in races.

Teams have measured shock position using linear sensors attached to the shock...

and hall effect sensors attached to the linkage...

The level of quality control in MX is generally poor compared to other motorsports. 

When you get shown shop tours of different parts manufacturers, none of them have the ability to properly measure what they are making or using. 

For instance, when i set up our Quality Dept to measure damper parts back in 2006, we spent over £100k , on top of the £100k worth of kit we had . MX teams cant justify that, they have to rely on OEM quality control.

As a reference, the supplier of the damper parts that we bought, also had to supply a billet of raw material with every batch for us to do an independant test, because it needed doing. 

Assuming the clip blew out of the body, my guess is that the radius in the bottom of the clip retaining groove was too sharp, and if the body is hard anodised, that also leads to micro-surface cracking. A decent lab will be able to tell you that, provided they go that far. 

I've done a bit of testing.  It can be fairly involved and time consuming which gets expensive in a hurry.  

Shocks don't explode very often so I don't see the teams spending the money.  I don't know what testing Showa/KYB/etc perform but it's obviously enough to keep failure to a minimum.  

To be honest...I'm amazed anything can stand up to the abuse pro riders dish out.

1000-2000psi is typical.  Potentially a bit higher if something funny was going on with the bladder.

Generally they have adequate margins on these things.  They sure don't do a hydrostatic test on every cylinder that goes out for production bikes and you don't see structural failures often.

My question would be...do the teams modify the internals for rider preference and do those changes effect reliability?

Yes and yes.  There are a lot of settings they do internally that aren't durability settings (bent shims, bypass grooves in the wall of the shock body, etc).  They can replace parts on a 2hr or 10hr basis or something that we'd never do.

I can't think of any modifications that would lead to high-pressure anomalies though, aside from an internal bottoming cup.  Usually it's the opposite.

Just thinking out side the box but …..

Negative pressure could have pulled the seal head inward during compression and the clip may have partially pulled out of the groove that then could have put misaligned side pressure on seal head.

It was from brand new. That shock is probably sitting at Showa already if I had to guess.

Thanks.

Almost certainly, i have watched parts break live on TV, on  a friday in China, and had them on my desk when i got to work on a Monday morning. 

A team that invests in why stuff breaks , instead of trotting out the 'bad batch' bollocks will save a lot of money.