Yesterday I drove to my brother's to take advantage of a warm garage and cutting torches in this spring replacement task. Results were very gratifying. If anyone has need to replace springs like this I highly recommend using this method of banding. Makes the job easy. I apologize to the masses now as I fully intended to take pictures but the camera got left behind. Its this over 50 brain.

Some notes. I replaced the rubber spring seats as well as the spring proper in this case. Upon removal of the springs (via one side at a time), the passenger side was broken in (2) places (in the bottom housing and 1 coil from the top) whereas the driver spring was broken in the bottom housing only. This vehicle does not have the hydraulic suspension so we removed the bottom shock bolt (most difficult task of the day), repositioned the shock away from the frame and proceeded to torch out the remaining spring bits. A long bar was necessary to pry the wheel assembly down about 1/2" so as to provide clearance to insert the compressed/banded spring. Then jack the wheel hub up with a jack to release the loading on the bands and snip away. The guys that banded the springs did a good job in securing them with 6 of the bands per spring (and yes it the same 3/4" crate banding material). They also knew enough not to band the top and bottom coils.

As I said fairly uneventful. Total job took about 4 hours total (book calls for 3.6) but we replaced one of the suspension struts at the same time and that took about 1hr because I couldn't get the wheel side mounting bolt to free up without Rube Goldberging it (missing 12pt "star" socket).

Anyways, car sits much better now and I didn't get (1) headlight flash coming home (car sat low in the back so headlights tended to shine into on coming traffic operator's eyes). Now the only thing left is to find the bongo drum knocking in the rear and identify the steering wheel vibration cause at 100kph. Currently travelling below 100kph with the radio on.

Ron

__________________
1995 E320 -171k-km
1995 S420 -333k-km