Gen4 - rocking side to side at speed

push down firmly on a corner and the car should bounce down up down to a rest. If it doesn't bounce then its the shocks. Although if it was knackered I would have thought you would be complaining of the ride being harsh as we had a rangie in our household shocks go and the ride became rock hard over bumps and had no compression. My sister drove it around for ages thinking it was fine till I had a drive and quickly realised it was broken as I also had the same car to compare to.

I think it's more common for shocks to fail, so to speak "soft", allowing the vehicle to bounce more than it should, rather than becoming rock hard as described above.

This is just my experience and it may be related to the type of shock, if a single tube shock sustains an impact, the body can deform to the point where the shock binds restricting piston travel, something which is a lot less likely to happen with twin tube shocks.

Apart from physical damage, shocks can fail in many ways, seals leak, they lose their nitrogen preload, they lose oil, and so on - most of these failure modes do not impact travel, but they do cause a reduction in damping which allows uncontrolled movement.

This could potentially be a shock problem but I would expect OME shocks to last more than a "few years".

I considered my G3 shocks good, passed all corner "bounce" tests and visual inspections. However when towing they lacked something so I swapped them. It was only when they became disconnected from the vehicle it was obvious they had failed. One offered no resistance at all, but on the vehicle it appeared fine. So if you suspect the dampers I recommend you check with at least one end disconnected from the vehicle.
 

Scimike wrote:

I considered my G3 shocks good, passed all corner "bounce" tests and visual inspections. However when towing they lacked something so I swapped them. It was only when they became disconnected from the vehicle it was obvious they had failed. One offered no resistance at all, but on the vehicle it appeared fine. So if you suspect the dampers I recommend you check with at least one end disconnected from the vehicle.

 

My general experience parallels this - many vehicles will pass the bounce test with defective shocks - that said, on a number of occasions I have been able to detect bad shocks from the driver's seat, even when they pass a bounce test..

My 8 month old 6500mile Gen4 LCV done this for the first time Big Jimny Meeting this year, the rear started swaying and gradually it worse until it felt like it would loose control (easing off the throttle stopped it), I did have more weight in that usual, tried different tyre pressures, reduced the weight which didn't help, and I re torqued up the wheel nuts and that seemed to make it better, but could have been a coincidence

When you say you re torqued up the wheel nuts, is that just a general tightening of the wheel nuts or is it a torqueing to spec. of the wheel nuts?