I sent my Avos away a little while ago to be rebuilt, not because of use ,as they only have 7500 miles on them ,but because they are over eight years old (cue fair weather driver slagging !).I got a phone call saying they couldn`t do it as they couldn`t get them apart ! I was not happy ,but what can you say ? So I said just replace the bushes on the one pair and the spherical bearings on the other .They then told me they didn`t have the parts to do that !!!!! If Avo don`t have the parts to repair Avo shocks Who does ? Anyway the shocks were sent back to me and on inspection all the holes in the tops and all of the allen screw heads were still full of oily crud ,it was obvious that nobody had even tried to disassemble them .
The biggest selling point of Avo is that they are rebuildable at 25% of their cost as this is obviously not the case so surely products prduced by Protech and the like must be better value for money what do you think ?

Shame real cars are not made to the same standards as rc cars!

ALL AVO UNITS ARE REBUIDABLE
HOWEVER IF THEY HAVE NOT BEEN CARED FOR OVER THE PAST 8 YEARS !! WE CAN NOT BE BLAMED FOR THE CONDITION WE RECEIVED THEM BACK IN.

DESIGNS ALSO CHANGE OVER THE YEARS, UNFORTUNATELY THE BUSHES WE USED ON YOUR UNITS OVER 8 YEARS AGO ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE,ARE WE TO BE BLAMED FOR DEVELOPMENT ?

Not wanting to start a fight or anything but how exactly are you supposed to look after your shocks? I wouldn't think of taking them off to clean them

This has nothing to do with development, it's about keeping spares for your older designs

indeed. Cheers Mr Ratner.

I'm unsure what "care" is expected with Shocks. I would imagine that on 99.99% of cars unless thay have failed shocks are not part of a normal service plan.

Also, The initial reason given was lack of care of the behalf of the user, and then it is explained that the bushes are no longer available.

Which is it?

Word of advice: employ someone who has the first clue about customer service.

The parts supply might be a problem, though AVO is a big firm so really ought to have spares available, even if they are good but serviceable secondhand spares to keep earlier dampers going for a reasonable length of time, though i would argue that 8 years is a reasonable length for a damper anyway, and certainly well past what you would consider to be acceptable for servicing a performance shock, so i can see both sides of the story there, playing devil's advocate for a second.

However .. all is not lost .. as Rob (B19GRR) rightly pointed out : Rod at Protech is the guy who set AVO up many years ago and he does rebuild some AVO dampers amongst others (incl gaz). In fact I moved over to Protech for my mail order dampers partly because of their unrivalled customer care and partly because of the near 0% fault rate in dampers, I'll sell no other damper mail order!

So if you still feel like keeping your AVO dampers and would like a 3rd party to at least look into rebuilding them then i suggest giving Protech a call.

HTH.

how in the f*** does one care for shock absorbers??

At no point to they appear on my cars service schedule as anything other than "check operation". Do they work? yes. Will the garage take them off and fiddle with them? No.

Furthermore, at no point do i plan to take them OFF my car, and lovlingly polish them.

If i wanted performance, I would buy a good brand, and clearly AVOs are not that.