Topic

I pulled off the back wheels today to do my back pads, only to discover that the previous owner must've had a hydragas problem... As you can see he decided to keep the car on the road. I know he only ever got it serviced and maintained at an XPart autoservice centre and ex MGR Dealer and must've paid an arm and 3 legs for this...

As you can see the shocker bushes have had the same problem as David's. I need to replace them with polybushes and have the height checked and set and a 4 wheel alignment done.

Ah yes, good old Suplex... Completely clueless!

I has to explain to the Suplex engineer why this was happening to my new damper bottom bushes too.

The problem being that they have used direct copies of the original Monroe dampers...and copied the fault! The internal sleeve in the bush is approx 4 mm too long.

Therefore the bush isn't compressed at all when the damper is bolted on. The bottom fitting can slide about on the rubber bush until it destroys it completely.

Shorten the sleeve by 4 mm and the bush is compressed when you tighten up the bottom fixing. The bottom can't slide about, problem solved.

I did a how to on this problem well before I'd even heard of Suplex.

A question for you David.

I have a knocking noise from my OSR.

I've replaced the shocker bushes at the bottom with polybushes and they're fine, The top mount is fine, as are all other bushes and balljoints.

The knuckle appears to be OK, so I think it may be the suplex unit itself. Would this seem a logical train of thought?

It's certainly a possibility.
Personally I haven't had any clonking from the rears, but I did replace the originals with stiffer ones from Suplex.

Usually the clonking is from the spring being weak, meaning that the spring seat disappears up into canister.

Is it possible to produce the noise by bouncing the car? I found that removing the damper allowed you to get the car corner bouncing enough to reproduce the noise. An assistant to listen to the noise while you bounce is handy. That's how I confirmed the source of the noise on mine.

Yes I can reproduce it by bouncing the car.