I saw a full set of suspensions at a wrecker that's from a tj. Not sure of mileage. The shocks are Monroe ones, not sure of the spring make though. How do we tell visually if the shocks are rooted?

I saw a full set of suspensions at a wrecker that's from a tj. Not sure of mileage. The shocks are Monroe ones, not sure of the spring make though. How do we tell visually if the shocks are rooted?

Oil leaking out of the assembly would be the only sign I can think of but no leaks does not mean they are not worn out. Personally if you need new shocks I'd not gamble with secondhand ones unless they were really low K's and that could be verified. To give you my example, I just replaced the front & rears on my TW wagon which had 90 000k. No leaks anywhere, rears were stuffed ( I did the pedders $14 test) and now that I've had them replaced realise they were knackered at the 40 000k mark. The fronts were ok but a little soft but extremely noisy, lots of knocking noises. Now that they have been replaced with brand new ones the improvement was quite noticeable. So the point I'm making here is that shocks gradually wear out and deteriorate with distance and don't always last as long as you might think. Monroe were OEM fitment on the Magna, if they are black most likely the originals.

yeah, visual inspection of oil is the easiest, but that tells you whether its throw away or anything else.

one rough way to tell is to push on the guard hard, so that the car bounces up and down. if the shock returns the car to normal height in less than ~1 stroke, then it should/may be ok.

either way, new ones aren't a great deal expensive.

and pedders are rip offs - the one i went to anyway

yeah, visual inspection of oil is the easiest, but that tells you whether its throw away or anything else.

one rough way to tell is to push on the guard hard, so that the car bounces up and down. if the shock returns the car to normal height in less than ~1 stroke, then it should/may be ok.

either way, new ones aren't a great deal expensive.

and pedders are rip offs - the one i went to anyway

I agree Pedders are'nt cheap, they charged me $250 for the rears on a wagon which are std shocks unlike struts. I did it because of convenience at the time. The price for the fronts was insane.

I fitted the suspension of a wrecking VRX of our 380. Not something I would normally do or recommend. But the VRX had 17,000 k's on it.
The reason I wouldn't is if it was knackered, the cost of pulling it out and refitting more (plus wheel alignments), would just about equal the cost of new shocks in the first place, and if I was to get half the mileage it still is hard to justify the cost. And the warranty would be terrible.