Have a look at
this thread particularly picture link in first post where the the shock mount has torn out part of the hoop! If you scroll down thread Rog has posted images of various MMC hoop designs over the years to accommodate the shock mount bracket which is also prone to break.
If the damper top mounting point is tearing out of the hoop, the mounting point clearly wasn't made strong enough, this is an engineering failure from the MMC rather than a function of the damper.
Based on personal experience I'd also suggest the leaf springs used by the MMC are the real reason for a lot of these issues, it seems inarguable the leaves were not properly tempered. Mine had gone completely soft in less than 10,000 miles which meant the rear dampers were having to work twice as hard and the loads transferred to damper bushes and mounting points must have been through the roof. When I removed them my AVO dampers were completely shot with zero resistance left in them, in just 6,000 miles the top bushes were also destroyed.
Yes, the bush material chosen by AVO isn’t the most durable as proven by all the reported early bush failures on other cars using AVOs, but I believe the root cause of my short damper and AVO bush life was largely due to soft and poorly tempered rear springs.
I can see how Roger's rubber spring assisters will work well, especially for people suffering the soft spring issue which I suspect is more common than we think. I was tempted to buy a set from Rog but decided to start with properly tempered rear springs and a set of big bump stop Bilsteins before committing. What I found was just as I'd expected, all the bottoming out was eliminated, and the car's composure was fully restored with nothing more than a pair of new properly tempered and correctly rated springs and set of quality dampers.
Let’s not kid ourselves here, Morgan rear suspension is about as basic as suspension gets, a solid rear axle and leaf spring setup is absolutely ancient and extremely well understood technology, it also persists to this day on nearly all light commercial vehicles, and what we know for sure after deploying this arrangement for well over 100 years is......
Get the spring rates and damping right…. and nothing else is needed!
