Boge (Sachs) shock absorbers all round! The car has just reached 88k on the (original I'm guessing) shock absorbers. We've already changed the OEM springs to Eibachs about 10k miles back, so this is just finishing the suspension off.
I chose Sachs (from GSF) as I ordered Bilstein from a company off eBay who didn't actually have them in stock (idiots). So GSF got the order and they got them in same day. Just needed to wait for the chance to fit them today.
Once the fronts were off it was clear to see that they were completely shot. No rebound at all in them, could push the piston in with little effort and it stayed where it was. The rears had some life in them still, but it looks like one of them had been replaced previously.
Didn't take too many pictures, so here are the few I did take.
Assembled new front. We didn't bother replacing the front top mounts as we don't see much in the way of deterioration on them. Visual check confirmed this, bearings still nicely coated in original grease and free moving.
Made in Germany!
Now for the rears! The manufacturing dates are printed on the stickers, and in the picture the top on is the drivers side, and the bottom the passengers side.
When we got to the top mounts the foam covering was damaged on the drivers side, which suggests that shock had already been played with. You have to rip the foam to access the top mounts. The date of the passenger shock is around the time of manufacture, but the drivers side is 2 years earlier. This is why I suspect that the drivers has already been changed, as I can't see the dates not matching from the factory.
It has to be said that access to the rear shock top mounts is pretty ridiculous, almost more so than on the Z3. You access them from inside the boot, but have to remove the adjustable "shelf" first. This is on the whole pretty straight forward to do, but a little fiddly at times due to access.
We've seen someone post elsewhere that the rear shocks are a 3 hour job, but we managed all 4, and sorted my badly sealed headlight in that time. Clearly we didn't have enough tea breaks then...
I can confirm that there is plenty of room to work in the boot of a Z4 though.