Hit a pothole, thought I broke a shock

[txj2go]

Driving around in this gfs town I hit a pothole or ditch then driving through a residential area I thought their road was extremely wavy. I decided it was the Jeep and the only thing that would cause that would be a broken shock (Bilstein 5100). We were 10-15 miles from home so we took the slow route and just put up with it, then about halfway home noticed that all of a sudden the ride was normal as if the shock was now working. So how would a shock break then somehow fix itself? I'm guessing that shocks have various valves that can open if you hit a large dip, maybe the valve opened then didn't immediately close and somehow managed to close later on.

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[gato]

Bilstein 5100 is a very basic shock, it does not have any bypass valves or variable damping controls. Also a shock is unlikely to be the item that breaks when hitting a pothole, unless your Jeep wasn't properly bump-stopped for the shock length.

You should just inspect your suspension, wheels and tires and see if anything is damaged.

It's possible that you were just paying too much attention to the ride after the hit, and then it all felt normal again. It is also possible that the tire that hit the pothole has damage to the sidewall, cords or plies. It is not uncommon for a kinked steel belt in the tires to somewhat smooth out after rolling for a while, but the damage is done, and the tire would need to be replaced.

Anyway - just inspect the components.

 

[txj2go]

I looked oer the suspension this morning and didn't see any problems. The bouncing seemed to be worse for front left so I jacked up that corner and spun the tire. I couldn't detect any deviation in the tread or either sidewall.

When we first thought something was wrong we were getting significant bouncing, like 2" up and down at slow city speeds. We drove around 5 miles thinking we could not drive very far like this, then we noticed that it went away. The bump that we hit didn't seem anything out of the ordinary so we didn't worry about it. When we first detected the bouncing we thought it was a very irregular road in that old residential area. After driving farther we decided it was the Jeep and not the road.

I'm going to try driving a little bit more tomorrow. I have to take a long highway trip Monday, if nothing else I could put the spare on the left front.

 

[txj2go]

I drove over 600 miles yesterday- all smooth, no problems.

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