The suspension on my car is the factory original parts. My car has 86000 miles. I do feel a slight continuos bouncing while going down the road and if I look at the empty passenger seat while driving you can see it shaking/bouncing. Any thoughts. I was thinking of replacing the shocks and struts. Is there a way of checking the shocks and struts to find out if they actually need replaced? I do believe I need an alignment also. I have replaced the tires because they were old and dry rotted. My car was shaking and bouncing before the tire change and I thought it would help. It may have helped some but it is still noticeable. I also have a sticky caliper at the rear of the car. I'm not sure if that would cause it. Any thoughts on best direction to go?

 

I couldn't tell how bad my 92 suspension was til one day i was in my shop and i was leaning on the 69 which is stock but all new suspension and then leaned on the 92 and it sank noticeably more than the 69. It's not a scientific way to tell but i know the 92 should have better suspension than a stock base coupe 69. my 92 has 180,000 miles on it. That probably should have been an indication.

 

Shocks and struts are guaranteed to be soft or bad at that age, exception being cars that were never driven (i.e. 20 milers).

I'm sure your bushings are all hard and/or ripped up too - but in most cases, the struts and shocks are the culprit.

You will definitely need an alignment when you change the struts, although you may have other steering components that need to be replaced at the same time.

 

This guy, telling thee truth.

 

Take it to an alignment shop that does free estimates and have the front end checked; parts that typically go bad are ball joints, idler arm and centerlink, shocks and struts, sway bar bushings and end links. The tie rod ends and control arm bushings probably won't be bad but are worth a look anyway and you might as well replace them or have them replaced while it's apart unless you're on a tight budget.

Got my car with 72k a few years back, it now has about 97k and I've had to replace all of those things. I'm on a tight budget so I just kept a very close eye on things and replaced stuff as it went bad, with no budget it'd be easier to just do it all at once with top-shelf parts and forget about it for a long while though.