Originally Posted by d.delano

You may want to think about making things easy and just buying from the dealer? Not the cheapest I know. If you have a MBCA membership I think you can get 10% off.

The reason I bring this up is I have read that the MB items in some instances are actually made to a higher standard than the aftermarket items even when made by the same manufacturer. One example of this would be flexible driveshaft couplings. Read a Star article to that effect which was describing the differences between MB parts and aftermkt by the same supplier. I always wondered why the dealer parts were so much more expensive, this provoked some thought on my part as to why.

I had a bad experience recently with an aftermarket part, a simple rubber hose. When it gets to the point that you cannot trust a simple aftermarket rubber hose, it's the last straw. At least it was with me. No more aftermarket. That aftermarket piece wasted three days of my time and I learned a lesson from it.

Whatever you do, do not buy Meyle. Don't even accept Meyle as a gift. Lemforder would be the brand I would trust if I were buying aftermarket, but in the interest of doing it right the first time I would buy only dealer parts for the suspension. That kind of work is tiresome, brutish, and dirty. I wouldn't want to have to do it again.