Of course, there’s a price to be paid for anything and I don’t just mean what you fork over to the mechanic every once in a while. Think of a syringe or a cake icing gizmo. This is usually done by using the force of the oing-oing-oing to shove oil from one compartment to another through tiny holes either between an inner tube and an outer tube (the twin-tube system) or from one end of a tube to another (the monotube system). Shock absorbers take the kinetic energy of the oing-oing-oing and turn it into some other form, usually heat energy, via friction. They’re actually dampers, which is nothing to do with that bush barbecue favourite consisting of flour and water wrapped around a stick and baked over hot coal. To stop the oing-oing-oing as the spring continues to vibrate after the initial shock, the vibration needs to be damped. Vibrations aren’t good for the human body if they go on for some time ( stop sniggering!). What you don’t want is the oing-oing-oing, as this is downright uncomfortable as well as terrible for the handling. Now, in a car, you want the initial boing as you go over a bump. The initial boing will result in lots of oing-oing-oings, with each oing getting smaller. After you’ve bounced down on that trampoline, you’ll get bounced back up again, or the weight on the end of the Slinky will bob up and down. What happens is that unless you act to stop it (technically known as damping), you get the boing-oing-oing-oing factor. Subject the spring to a sudden extension then let it compress by tying something to the end of the Slinky then letting it bounce out, or by letting yourself bounce down onto your bottom on the trampoline. What’s more, hair tends to be self-damping unless its gelled like crazy.). (Don’t try this on the hair of a curly-haired person unless you want to absorb the shock of a slap in the face. (For those interested, the weird ones we see in vehicles are usually leaf springs.) Now, when you stretch a spring then let it recoil, which is what happens when your car goes over a bump, what happens? If you can find a handy trampoline or Slinky, you can try this out for yourself. That’s a long and rather technical term for what we’re going to call the boing-oing-oing-oing factor.Īlthough some of the springs in your vehicle’s suspension don’t look like Slinky Springs, mattress springs or trampoline springs, they are still springs and behave like any other spring. What the shock absorbers do is control the harmonic oscillation. Describing all of this and all of its variations would take ages and could take up several posts, so we’re going to talk about the part that does a lot of work that you might not realise: the shock absorbers.Ĭontrary to what you might think from the name, a shock absorber doesn’t have the job of soaking up the jolting, bouncing and jouncing that comes from hitting a bump. The full suspension system involves the wheels (pneumatic tyres), the springs, the shock absorbers and the links. It doesn’t do any good to anything delicate you’re transporting, such as eggs, or if you’re trying to take a blancmange or sloppy chili con carne to a potluck dinner. While this is great fun when you’re a kid riding in the trailer and getting bumped up and down, it’s not so much fun for longer trips and certainly doesn’t do your spine any good at all. Without suspension, you feel all the bumps in the road. However, if you remember back to the days of riding home-made go-karts, a basic skateboard or (I won’t tell on you) the trailer, you probably know why cars and vehicles in general are fitted with suspension systems. We don’t tend to think about them too much until that time that the mechanic sucks in his cheeks, shakes his head and says “Your shocks are just about gone, mate and you’re going to replace them at a cost of $oodles a pop.” (Apologies for inadvertent sexism but where are all the female grease monkeys?) We kind of take our suspension systems and our shock absorbers for granted.
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