You are so right, the rear shock absorbers were a nightmare.
The front KYB were perfect no issue. The rears were completely wrong according to my garage, as were the Bilstein’s supplied and he ended up replacing with different KYB shocks he sourced after much cross referencing of part numbers with KYB and Bilstein customer service.
Thankfully I was able to return the rear KYB and Bilstein shocks to Autodoc and got my money refunded eventually. I should have made a complaint with hindsight.
Sadly the factory Mitsubishi branded rear shocks don’t give away the manufacturer (unless it’s Mitsubishi themselves which I highly doubt).
I don’t have any part numbers to hand as this was last year. Although the old parts are in my garage in storage.
I feel like a hypocrite but I’m now looking at returning my Outlander to original ride height. I don’t really want to use the old factory springs I stored in my garage.
Equally I don’t want to fork out near £100 per spring from my local Mitsubishi dealer for OEM springs especially knowing how poor they are in my experience.
I’m now looking at replacement standard height springs from KYB, Lesjafors or Suplex again from the German based Autodoc website.
As for the front strut brace, I was most disappointed to eventually find a suitable brace that actually fitted between electric motor and engine only for it to become a vibration enhancer.
I’ve always fitted steel 1-piece Omp strut braces from Italy but they don’t offer a suitable item for the mk3.
The steel factory strut brace for the Outlander mk2 I bought didn’t fit my mk3 and had to be returned. I only tried the mk2 brace because I was told both the Outlander mk2 and mk3 are based on the Lancer X chassis platform - which may not be true.
The aluminium 3-piece strut brace I bought is very strong and stiff and nice quality but the main bar is hollow and acts as a resonator to the engine sadly.
The vibration and noise when the engine kicked in was unbearable and you could feel it through the steering wheel and pedal box.
My garage tried to source some supression bushes and seals to help but nothing worked.
The minute we removed the strut brace all vibration retuned to normal. As for handling I couldn’t actually detect any difference in handling other than it made the steering quicker but tighter in feel.
The mk3 is a cab forward design and the brace was very close to the reinforced firewall bulkhead anyway which is probably why Mitsubishi didn’t need to fit one to the mk3.
It did however look very cool under the hood in silver and blue
oh well.
