damper inserts

[street]

I have my original 30 year dampers say done 7.5k and a set of Koni classic i picked up, that have done 10k or so (dont know age).

Question; If there are no obvious signs of leaks etc, how do you test a damper when it out of the tube.

All of them require some tugging to pull up, but drop down with very little effort, one will drop by itself for 2 inches before stopping.

Comments appreciated.

Thanks

[UAB807F]

Let's start off by admitting that I don't know the answer to your question but here's an observation from when I had standard dampers on my car.

The car wasn't a daily driver and so when I did I noticed that it was easy to compress the rear springs and you'd get the impression the dampers weren't working. But after a few cycles everything firmed up and the car drove as I would expect it to.

Also I don't know if the bound/rebound resistances are equal on the OEM dampers, I know you can have differing ratios on some adjustable dampers so I wouldn't immediately class them as a fail if the bound/rebound aren't identical. (curious - anyone else know ?)

So my take would be that if the dampers increased resistance after a few cycles then they'd be ok. Certainly when I've had dampers fail there's been no resistance at all and it's been very obvious, even to me.

Brian

[nmauduit]

were they stored horizontally prior to manual checking ? it could be that part of the oil would have been replaced by air... as for actual specs verification some shock retailers/installers would have a testing machine, which also would help setting them to the same damping level (I would say for about 25 a piece).