ah, your still cube to me:4tongue:
if you got 50k miles or more you need this... I wouldn't even call this a mod, this falls more as servicing or maintenance. if the originals weren't close to a grand all around I would have done them as soon as I got my fx, I did consider it but it still rode OK so I figured I'd wait... glad I waited
Monroe used to hold seminar type parties for mechanics, it was so long ago that they used to actually hire a few strippers for the parties too, way before something like that would be considered politically incorrect. anyway, at these seminars, in between the food spread & the stripper show they showed all about shocks & struts & how they affect ride, traction, tire wear & overall handling. back then it was shown that even at 25k miles shock/struts have deteriorated to the point that replacing them would be beneficial, by 40k miles they have degraded to the point that stability & dampening ability is significantly compromised, personally I believe it. the shocks oscillate thousands of times each mile, it's sole job is to dampen & resist movement, but in just doing what they do they do deteriorate. seals wear & with gas charged, eventually pressure is lost over time & mileage, replacing shock struts at even 40k miles would be a very noticeable improvement. the majority of 4 year old or older cars on the road today really need shocks/struts but this is also one of the most neglected things on most used cars. I've bought used cars with well over 100k miles on them, most still had the original shock/struts. I used to replace them always & wind up with a car that road great again & felt much younger than it was.
the cars that really suck in this area is cars with electronic suspensions, some of these struts can be close to & even over $1,000 EACH, & you can bet that no one is changing these when there due... the fact that they have expensive funky computer controlled electronic variable valves in them doesn't do anything to help prevent them from wearing out hydraulically, so now that 5 year old Benz with 75k miles still rides kinda OK, but it may need close to or over 4k worth of suspension work to really feel like it should again.
we are lucky that this isn't a very big expense on our cars, if by chance you can install them yourself then there down right cheap for the amount of improvement they can make, nothing else can make your car feel as new again as replacing the dampeners all around, the more mileage you have the more you really need these. as far as alignment, the fx doesn't really have much adjustment that would change from installing new strut/shocks so realistically if your alignment is fine you can install these without doing an alignment again, wouldn't be absolutely necessary like many other cars would be. of course rechecking the alignment never hurts either but you can get away without it if you really wanted to.
