Ugly Shock Failure

[Boink]

Got in the Sprite the other day for a drive (having driven it with no issues a week earlier) and it made a horrible clanking/clunking sound... from the right rear. At first I though "junk in the trunk", but no amount of re-arranging mattered. Jumping up and down on that fender produced the noise, so I climbed under and found that the Armstrong shock lever had sheared right off! Never seen such a failure (nor had friends). Opened it up to examine, but it seemed OK.
Took the opportunity to replace both (with re-built ones from World Wide)... and all is now well.

 

[HealeyRick]

Haven't heard of that before. Fatigue or did you hit some railroad tracks the wrong way? Peter C was a good choice!

 

[Boink]

Interestingly, when I put the car in the garage all was well... so if it snapped it did in the last few moments of driving or at the very start of the next outing. I still can't figure out when it happened.
My hunch is that I inherited modified, STIFF leaf-springs with the Bugeye... though I'm not sure it's related. The shock that broke was about 12 years old (I think). When we operated it in a manual way on the bench, it seemed OK, so maybe it was an aberrant stress or fatigue failure.

 

[SaxMan]

+1 for going with Peter C.'s shocks. I have them on my '69 Sprite for several years. I had one of the shocks fail, and Peter sent me a new one, no questions asked. I sent the old one back to him.