Beezil said:
I look at hiems a little differently i guess......
even if there were raw facts that showed a similarly sized tre to be stronger, and last longer than a heim, I would still use heims, since I use a total of TWENTY, 3/4-16/5/8" heims, it is nice to be able to carry just a few spare heims that will take care of BOTH steering and suspension breakages....
as opposed to having to carry heims AND TRE's.....
Oh how times change for Mr. Used-To-Be-Anti-Heim. I agree, though. There is nothing like having your entire suspension and steering using the same joints so all you have to carry is 2 lefthand and 2 righthand thread spares, along with various lengths of tapped DOM.
It depends on what you want to accomplish. A 5/8" bore 3/4" thread heim will have a load rating of around 10 times a stock TRE. Heims are very, very simple to work with.
If you buy good quality, which means a very tight race to bearing tolerance so grit cannot get into the joint as well as an excellent teflon liner bonding process so the entire liner doesn't get spit out, then heims last a long time. Not as long as TRE's for daily driving, but longer for offroading. Heims got a bad name in offroading because the first units were cheap designs that spit out the teflon liner on the first major wheeling trip, destroying the joint.
Anyway, the more offroading you do, the more you will probably prefer heims. The more onroad driving you do, the more you will probably prefer TRE's. Some good heim choices include Aurora Bearing, QA1 and a couple others I can't remember right now. I daily drove my rig with a heim crossover setup and loved it. I think it is one of the best D30 mods you can do.
I think the reason people report a different driving experience with heims is the change to a crossover steering setup where the draglink and tierod are no longer connected (they both attached directly to the steering knuckle). I ran a heim crossover setup on my D30, and my D44 with hi-steer arms uses TRE's. I notice no difference between them as they are both crossover setups. I will probably switch to heims when the TRE's wear...but they are monsters so that should be awhile.
Keep in mind that when you raise the draglink you also need to raise the trackbar to avoid bumpsteer. A heavy duty TRE based setup mounted in the stock position will require no major modification, whereas a heim based setup will.
Good luck.
Nay