Spring Compressor Safety

Compressing springs is one of the most dangerous jobs you can do on any classic car. And there's only a few cases where you really need to do it. The, uh, most often when re re, uh, working on replacing front suspension components, the, the front spring is caught between the tower and the lower control arm. And usually, so in some cases, you need to compress that to get it out of there. Also, on the rear suspension, sometimes you'll need to compress the spring in order to either replace or service those springs as well. But as soon as you start compressing a spring, there's a lot of built up kinetic energy, things can go wrong real quick. So you wanna take your time and make sure you're safe and that you don't damage anything along the way. Now, the spring compressor itself is a pretty, pretty strand tool. What happens in a lot of cases guys will, you, you should always use them in sets of three. And what happens is a lot of cases guys start to use one, they say, oh, I can get one on this side and I can get one on this side, but I can't get one on a third side because something's in the way. The problem with that, as soon as you just have two, two spring compressors on any spring, it can still bow out one way or the other. That's not a situation where you want yourself in there is something you can do to help if you, if there is absolutely cannot get three of them on there. You wanna take, like in this case, we used a, an exhaust U bolt and what this does is it prevents the spring from springing out one way or the other. And it's just a way of, you know, it doesn't need to be tight, doesn't need to be torqued on there. It just needs to be there to prevent the spring from shooting out one way or the other. So if, if you can't get three spring compressors on there do put one of these on and that'll like stop the spring from becoming a projectile. And uh to use one of these, it's fairly straightforward. You want to get the jaws on both ends. But before we do that here, before we do that, you also wanna, because any, whenever you're using uh any kind of uh tightening device under force, you always wanna make sure you grease the threads. Otherwise these threads will, you don't have to put a lot of grease on them. You just need to get some grease on these threads. Otherwise these threads can gall and soon as they gall you'll be fighting, not only to get it, the spring compressed, you might be fighting to get it off your car completely. So put a little uh high impact grease on it, then you can just, they just have two jaws that go on each side, then you just start tightening it up the uh and as you go, you know, maybe tighten it like, you know, 34 turns and then move on to the other one because the idea is to bring all of these tighter at the same time. Yes, it takes time to keep going around and around and bringing it down together. But if you just work on one side, you're just guaranteeing yourself, it's gonna come shooting out one way or another, you're gonna have other kinds of problems. The, uh, so the bottom line, you know, and then here's a case where we've got, this is the rear spring out of a show Belle. Um, this is what happens. You look at the spring and how deformed it is. It's not like a consistent coil. What's happened here is, you can easily see it's done. Somebody's done what they call a heat lowering. They wanted to get the car to sit lower. So they applied heat to the spring that does take the spring out of the steel. But it also affect it. It changes the metallurgy. It makes the string spring weak in the spots where you applied heat and it becomes a dangerous situation. Now, if you go to put a spring compressor on there, now you've got a spring that's all twisted and distorted and you won't want to come down uniformly. Can it still be done? Yes. Sometimes I've gone in rather than deal with the spring compressor, I'll just go in and cut them and get rid of them if somebody's, you know, used the torch method to lower them. So it's a good idea if the springs are kind of distorted like this, just cut the spring, get them out of their, their manufacturers still making lots of springs they're available. That's it. Kind of in a nutshell. Guys. Take your time. Don't, you don't have to do it in a hurry, but you do have to stay safe.