Hold down clamp from a rocker arm

[Ed Weldon]

I wonder if these GM rocker arms are heat treated steel with a high carbon content. If not you should be able to weld to them to make oddball shaped hold downs like when you have to machine a cast part or assemply that has no usable machining registry spots. Like parts of automobiles or machine tools.

[Toolmaker51]

I wonder if these GM rocker arms are heat treated steel with a high carbon content. If not you should be able to weld to them to make oddball shaped hold downs like when you have to machine a cast part or assemply that has no usable machining registry spots. Like parts of automobiles or machine tools.

Speculation; they are mild steel to withstand drawing [forming] and deep casehardened. Either way, very close to file hard.

[Ed Weldon]

Case hardened small block rocker arms. Makes sense. I'd love to see the equipment setup for case hardening thousands of rocker arms.
OK; figuring a good case hardening is maybe .020 inch thick, that doesn't sound like a whole lot of extra carbon in a good (looking) weld. And given the nunber of small blocks that end up back in the electric furnaces, finding rocker arms for welding experiments should be easy. In the worst of all possible worlds the mods to a raw rocker arm can be made with good brazed joints to minimize the carbon migration and accomodate the natural loss of temper in the rocker arm structure.
This sounds like more damn trouble than it is worth. But then the vast majority of applied science activity (I hesitate to call ir "research") ends in failure.
And science is fun and more productive than watching athletes run around a field chasing a ball, especially if you could care less about the outcome of a game.

[Rikk]

I wonder if these GM rocker arms are heat treated steel with a high carbon content. If not you should be able to weld to them to make oddball shaped hold downs like when you have to machine a cast part or assemply that has no usable machining registry spots. Like parts of automobiles or machine tools.

I am not sure of the carbon content, but the ones we use are nitrided, never tried to weld one. I don't know enough about the nitride process to say what would happen if one tried to weld it. I do know that they are significantly tougher than the standard aftermarket racing bits. We went from several sets a season to swapping them once mid way through.