Jimmyd
29th March 2012, 10:37 PM
Advice please chaps.
Her in doors has a BMW 1 series Sport which is really quite hard in the suspension but generally handles like it's on rails. In the past 2yrs I have only driven it about three times, one of which being last week when I took it for MOT. Once again I was surprised at how well it handled. Unfortunately I arrived home this evening to "my car is all over the road" and after a brief drive I can confirm it really is!! My gut reaction was there is something wrong with a tyre but brought it back checked all the bushes, springs, tyre pressures, swapped wheels around, went for another drive & it's just a bad. There are no knocking noises etc
Now I will go back to the MOT I mentioned it had last week. I don't know what happens at your test stations but over here they are not independant garages they are DOE centres and contain all sorts of fancy equipment for testing shocks, brake balance etc. I actually paid very close attention to that because I was interested in how well matched each pair of shocks were and they were very well balanced.
So back to my question, is it possible that gas shocks will lose pressure with out leaking any oil? Right now it seems like the only explaination to me but I'm old school and used to seeing oil filled shocks leaking if gone (well most of the time anyway). Or any other explaination for such a drastic change in handling given I'm fairly confident I've given evrything else a real good going over.
J
Her in doors has a BMW 1 series Sport which is really quite hard in the suspension but generally handles like it's on rails. In the past 2yrs I have only driven it about three times, one of which being last week when I took it for MOT. Once again I was surprised at how well it handled. Unfortunately I arrived home this evening to "my car is all over the road" and after a brief drive I can confirm it really is!! My gut reaction was there is something wrong with a tyre but brought it back checked all the bushes, springs, tyre pressures, swapped wheels around, went for another drive & it's just a bad. There are no knocking noises etc
Now I will go back to the MOT I mentioned it had last week. I don't know what happens at your test stations but over here they are not independant garages they are DOE centres and contain all sorts of fancy equipment for testing shocks, brake balance etc. I actually paid very close attention to that because I was interested in how well matched each pair of shocks were and they were very well balanced.
So back to my question, is it possible that gas shocks will lose pressure with out leaking any oil? Right now it seems like the only explaination to me but I'm old school and used to seeing oil filled shocks leaking if gone (well most of the time anyway). Or any other explaination for such a drastic change in handling given I'm fairly confident I've given evrything else a real good going over.
J