so I have Nissan replace my struts with the Konis. Now whenever I go over a slight bump in the road at a relatively fast rate of speed (somehing like 30+), it feels and sounds like my car just bottomed out. It's real loud and quite jarring, but I know for a fact the car is not bottoming out. What could be the reason for this?

 

did you adjust the dampening before the install?

 

before the install---NO. after the install---YES...one turn from full hard.

 

Do not start out with the rebound set that high, go back out and dial down to full soft. Once you get some mileage on the setup, then look at the need to set things higher. You can have too much rebound and not realize it thinking you have things nice and tight when your actually set too tight. At www.koni-na.com take a look at their motorsports catalog, I think page 14 or so tells you how to dial in the right amount.

On your problem. Put the car on jack stands and check every single bolt involved in the install and make sure they are tighened proper, this would include the nuts at the top of the shock piston shafts, even the sway bar endlinks.

If that does not work, work to isolate any one corner of the car. Also checking for oil leakage at the tops of each shock is not a bad idea. Were the shocks brand new?

 

yeah, the shocks were new. I even took the car back to Nissan and had them look over everything again and they said they tightened every bolt in the area. I will set them to damn near full soft and see what happens

 

alright, i turned them to full soft and the problem is still there. is there some sort of break in period?

 

Don't trust the dealership. With a few exceptions, they suck *****, and lie, and are generally incompetent.

There are of course some exceptions (I've seen some decent dealerships post on these forums, for example), but even those guys will admit that many other dealerships are crap. And within the dealerships, some techs are good, and some are crap.

Check the bolts... endlink bolts, A-arm bolts, all of them.

 

I should have been clear. I was telling you to turn down the rebound control to soft as a starting point for tuning vs just dropping the car's off the lift set higher then that. Didn't mean to imply that I thought your problems were related to how the shocks were set. Their is no break in period.

As stated above, check things yourself as far are all the bolts go. After that I would unhook the end links and tie them and the sway's out of the way and drive around a bit, that will eliminate bad endlinks out of the picture.

Which end of the car is the sound coming from?

 

ok i just got back from Nissan. It seems as thhough the strut does not have enough room to compress...in this i mean when the shock rod compresses, it hits the top of the shaft if that makes sense. when the car is sitting on the ground there is like 2-3" of rod visible, so i guess when i'm hitting these bumps in the rod the strut rod simply does not have enough space to travel, hence the "bottoming out" feeling/sound i'm getting....so now i'm just going to put the stock strut back on and this will probably eliminate my problem

 

Wait a minute! Since when do you see 2-3" of shock piston rod? Your front oem dust sheild/bump stop assemblies should hide the piston shafts from view. They didn't reinstall the front dust shields did they. That totally explains what is going on.

See how with the oem dust shield/bump stops in place that you cannot see the shock piston shafts.


Rear Koni shocks have built in dust shields/bump stops that can't be removed.

 

2-3" of shock travel is sufficient. Please take your car to a reputable shop to fix this (ie not the dealer)!