front struts - how to know when to replace them?

I have a 2wd 99 extra cab regular car height 5 lugger with 120k miles and im wondering how to tell if the front struts are past their life.

its not like anything is telling me they are bad or causing problems but the reason I ask is when I look under the truck there is only about 1" of clearance between the bump stop and I am thinking it should have a bigger gap then that so are my struts sagging?

let me add the truck sits level and rides great and it doesn't feel like it ever bottoms out but I see clean spots where the bump stops touch on the arms so im sure there are times it does bottom out on large road dips.

so far I have flushed the ranny fluid, replaced oil and filter, fuel filter relocation and replacement, MAF sensor cleaning and air filter, belts and new idler pulleys, replaced the upper and lower ball joints and outer tie rods and did a front brake job and rotors, rear shocks, and replaced all three dry and cracked rubber brake lines, so im pretty close to covering all the maint issues and worn out parts on this old truck.

at $100 each for stock replacement struts, i don't want to change these "just for the heck of it" so am I worrying about nothing here with what "looks like" very limited travel space, or does it sound like I need new front struts to "renew" my suspension travel?

also I need to add that im sure these are still the original factory struts because they have Toyota stamped into the shock

I have never worked on struts so (I assume) you buy the whole thing as an assembly and don't try reusing the old springs?

 

crickets chirping, ..... anybody???

 

I had the same question. I found some vids (on other vehicles) that showed swapping struts with reuse of the coils, but I think i'd rather just buy struts with the coils if only to avoid the hazard of compressing them.
Right now I just need to swap out the shocks but I'd be curious to hear other people input on this.