g'day I'm Brett I'm upgrading my suspension on my Land Rover Defender
with a set of Koni Radi 90 dampers these are considered to be one of the ultimate
shock absorbers available they are a twin tube design with a huge body size
of 17 millimeters a shaft diameter of 18 and a piston size of 42 millimeters the
outer tube is 2.5 millimeters thick built to withstand damage from rocks
they are a full hydraulic shock with a large oil capacity allowing for greater
cooling and efficiency and come with an adjustable rebound to adapt the damping
to your Springs or load or to restore damping after many thousands of
kilometers of use these Koni's can also be reconditioned they are a straight
replacement with no modification necessary when fitted to a standard
suspension just look at the size difference between my original shocks
and the new Koni's. price-wise I hope you're sitting down because they are
quite expensive but you get what you pay for.
so it's been four years since I installed my Koni Radi 90's on my
Defender in that time I've traveled 58,000 kilometers which included a
thirty thousand kilometer solo trip around Australia so let's take a quick
look at some of the footage from that trip to show you the conditions that the
Koni's were used under.
and the results are I'm absolutely happy with my purchase the Koni Raid 90s have
performed virtually flawlessly over the last four years I could travel really
corrugated tracks like out on the Oodnadatta or heading into lake Eyre or into
lots of really rough sand dune country and the shocks would only ever be warm
to very warm to the touch which just goes to show the amount of oil capacity
really helps dissipate that heat which should mean a much longer service life
for adjustment the shocks can be adjusted for the rebound damping force I
found the rear ones to be a little bit soft from the factory so I've adjusted
those clockwise around one to three half turns for memory probably round two to
three and that helped match my heavy-duty Land Rover Springs front and
rear much better the only two issues I encountered were some rear lower shock
bushes failing due to installation error by the company I paid to install them
for me they used the incorrect bushes for my car as the kit comes with two
different types so I've changed those over to the correct bushes and I've had
no issue since I also had a rear spring pop out when I was under full extension
I think this may have been caused by the shocks being long travel with an extra
40 millimetres so I'm thinking that it may have just been enough to
allow the spring to pop out of its seating but this was easily
rectified and I put some dislocation cones in the rear just to protect this
from any any future occurrence otherwise they performed excellently I've not had
no other issues with them and when the day does come I can get them rebuilt
in Australia so
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