3 replies to this topic

[vxtmike]

Hi all,

I've just taken my shocks off of the car as one was leaking and knocking (again) and I've noticed that all the shocks had cracks in the top blue mount with the adjuster in it. One of these was replaced last time they went in to be serviced and even that has some evidence of cracking, obviously I'll be contacting Gaz to see if i can get these fixed but I'm not sure that I really want to run shocks that seem to fail so readily. I guess the question to ask is has anyone seen cracking like seen below on the Mk II's? If Gaz cant sort me out I'm tempted with some Quantum Zeros!

 

 

 

and the newish one (slightly different colour)

 

[Mike (Cliffie)]

Get them sent back to Warren at Gaz and he will see them right.

 

Had no cracking issues with the MKII.

[vxtmike]

I've already sent Gaz an email Mike, will see what comes of it after the bank holiday.

 

I have been looking at photos of the MkIIs and this part doesn't seem massively different at the affected interface, the potential cause that I've come up with is the that shock bodies are out of tolerance as the cracking seems to be due to a high static hoop stress in the threaded interface maybe this stress then cycles in use due to the poisson effect of the parts due to load to cause these fatigue cracks (pure guesswork and a bit of engineering nous make up that hypothesis, could be thermal cycling also).

 

To be honest, as a test engineer I'm amazed at the statistical likelihood of getting 4 out of 4 affected parts if the shocks have anywhere nearing an 'acceptable' failure rate over a sensible design life, I must be as unlucky as a lottery winner is lucky (statistically speaking)! As I don't believe I'm that unlucky I would strongly recommend everyone with these, and for safety's sake the MKIIs wipe the crud off of there shocks and have a look, I didn't notice them until I cleaned them off once off the car.

[ollie2007]

I run the same shocks and have had NO issues like this, I did send the rear shocks back to gaz last year for a service as 1 was knocking, apart from that no issues.