Ride Quality Deteriorating

[Shawn Clark]

Originally Posted by edthefox5

I forgot...have you tried the classic put all your weight on front fender and bounce corner up & down real quick and forcefully. How noisey is that? A bouncer and a sqeeker or a firm come right back up and stay put?

Best way to do this at a dealer lot vs. a new car when possible. Even so it is dicey with some vehicles. My 240 didn't seem to show much problem on the front struts, but when I pulled them they were completely FUBAR--essentially non-functional, blown so that I could fully extend them or retract them without them ever returning to position. The backs looked awful in this test but were in somewhat better shape when I pulled them. With the ruined struts the front still came back to position with little overshot. (I could definitely detect difference AFTER the swap, but before I would have sworn the problem was in the rear.)

Takeaway is that the test can tell you if a shock/strut is bad, but also lets many bad ones "pass." The test seems less sensitive in the front where much of the normal running weight is.

Oh, and in my defense, the dealer did the same test at my request and told me the rear's were shot (without any comments from me.) We were both wrong about which end was the biggest problem.

P.S. If anyone replaces shocks/struts make sure that the boots are in good shape as well. (Haven't looked up the Prius parts to see how relevant it might be.) It might also be a good time to put in some polyurethane bushings to improve handling response--loved these on the 240 but I did springs and sway bars at the same time with same ride height (looked stock except for some Tokico blue on the struts.)

[Patrick Wong]

I agree that the "bouncing" test is not likely to be very helpful - that seems to work better with softly-sprung full-size American cars. I had a similar experience with my 2001, where there was no obvious bounce problem and no oil leakage. However after I took the front struts apart I found that one cartridge would collapse when depressed, and took a very long time to return to the extended position. The rear shocks showed oil leakage on the body, so it was easy to make the decision to replace those.

The 2001 boots had totally disintegrated so they definitely needed to be replaced. It is reasonable to replace all rubber parts while the strut/shock is disassembled.