Shock absorbers can be tested in several ways. Testing shock absorbers outside the vehicle is the least convenient method, since the dismounting and remounting of the absorbers takes up a considerable amount of time. For this reason non-dismountable testers started to be used. These are either resonance or vibration-tail testers. Resonance testers need a vibration platform on which to vibrate the wheel of the tested suspension. One such tester is protected as a utility model and a patent application has been filed under the title: “Non-Dismountable Tester for Verification of the Comprehensive State of Half-Axles of Passenger Vehicles”. The tester is described in the article “New mobile tester diagnoses the state of vehicle shock absorbers”, written by Martina Kodýdková. Vibration-tail testers analyse the tailing of a swinging car body. These are quite expensive devices. Vibration-tail testers also include devices which operate with the manual swinging of body of the car being tested. However, it is necessary that a car makes at least one complete vibration, a condition which cannot be met by some newer types of passenger vehicles.

The non-dismount tester, developed by Doc. Ing. Ivan Mazůrek, CSc. of the Brno University of Technology, works by manually swinging the car body. In thinking through the design, the inventor tried to remove the drawbacks of previous vibration-tail testers, i.e. to ensure the tester would work on all known models of passenger cars and to reduce purchase and operation costs.

This non-dismount tester analyses the vibration-tail of shock absorbers using a resistance sensor (2); the spring-loaded scanning arm (3) fits from below under the wheel well of the car and scans vertical vibrations. Data are carried from the sensor directly to a computer, where they are processed in a special application running on the MS Excel platform. The advantage of the device is that measuring can be done on any flat surface.

This sensor of car body vibrations is protected by a utility model and along with the measuring method it is protected by a patent under the title: “Method of Determining the Damping Properties of Vehicle Axles and a Device Used for this Method”.

Photo: Institute of Machine and Industrial Design, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering