Johnsburg potholes and cracks are rough on your car, truck or SUV struts, shocks and suspension

You don't always have to drive

off-road after winter to feel as
though you're off-road. When
you leave your Johnsburg home,
you're liable to see some potholes
that will challenge your struts,
shocks and suspension.

You’re familiar with rumble strips on the roads, right. They’re the rough areas in a road designed to make the kind of noise that will wake sleepy drivers or those not paying sufficient attention to something ahead.

In some places around America and the world, roads have been built with musical rumble strips. They’re designed so that, as you drive over the rumble strips, they create musical sounds. In fact, they’ll play a specific song.

While that’s very interesting, and it would probably be fun to drive over musical rumble strips a while, the kinds of bumps and potholes thrown at you this late Johnsburg winter have hardly been music to your ears, or to your car, truck or SUV.

The potholes and cracks in the pavement around Johnsburg and beyond, are almost exclusively random. While you might go out of your way to drive over musical rumble strips, if you’re like most of us, you’ll go out of your way to avoid the potholes and cracks you’ll more often find on the roads.

Potholes and cracks in the road can be jarring. If a pothole is bad enough, and someone is sipping coffee in the car while you go over that pothole, that person is liable to wear some of that coffee.

Ideally, we would all like to drive over newly paved roads that are as smooth as butter. And the shocks, struts and suspension systems on the vehicles we drive are designed to give us a smooth ride no matter what kinds of irregularities the pavement offers.

Of course, those struts, shocks and suspension systems only do so much; inevitably, we feel the potholes and cracks in the road, some worse than others.

While potholes and cracks in the road can annoy us, or make our coffee splash over the edge of the cup, they do more than that.

The closer a road gets to the day when it will be repaved or replaced, the more we’re liable to notice those potholes and cracks. They’re going to get bigger and bigger.

All the work our struts, shocks and suspensions do to provide us with a smooth ride comes at a cost. Struts, shocks and suspensions wear over time, eventually even wearing out to the point they must be replaced. Sometimes, they even break.

If you remember that old song about the leg bone being connected to the hip bone, you’ll have an idea of how struts, shocks and suspensions on cars, trucks and SUVs work. Damage in one area puts stress on another area. The wear and damage tends to spread – unless, of course, you cut it off at the pass and fix it early.

In other words, if you don’t attend to wear and tear early, you’re liable to have more wear and tear to worry about. And that’s certainly not music to you ears when you pull out of your Johnsburg driveway.

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