I wanted to test this theory, so here's what I did.

'89 300E in a junkyard, with the suspension intact, car raised and wheels off.

Removed nut from top of strut tower, allowed the suspension to fully extend un-restrained (BANG).

The sway-bar holds the lower control arm from extending too far, so I released the strut from the other side also (again: BANG). Still not extended far enough, interference between the swaybar and control arm, so I disconnected the swaybar.

Now the control arm is able to move down further, the spring still hanging in there, I stood and bounced on the control arm to extend it down as far as possible, the spring still will not budge.

I attached a strap to the center of the coil spring, pulled outward as hard as I could without mechanical assistance, broke the strap, spring still in there. I tried prying the inboard coil from the control arm (getting daring), still no joy.

Now I went back in with the spring compressor, oops, the spring is arced too much to fit it easily, a little help from an external spring compressor (I took three different spring compressors in).

Quite a bit of compressing was necessary to release the spring from the completely un-restrained control arm, I don't think it was going to hop out on its own.

All of the time the strut top was waving in the wind, at least once the swaybar was released.

Is this a safe thing? To replace the strut without a spring compressor? To tempt fate as I did? I would recommend at least using some type of spring compressor to contain the spring as you lower the suspension, but my experiment indicates that it isn't easy to extract a spring from this car with the control arm installed and no spring compressor.

This car apparently had pretty good control-arm bushings, and they were tight. It might have come apart if I had loosened the control-arm bushings allowing the control-arm to pivot further than 90*, didn't look easy.

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Gone to the dark side

- Jeff