reversing spring eyes at home

i had a Model t spring but needed to reverse the eyes to drop it down a little bit. so here is how i did it, not really hard just takes a while. it took me a little over and hour

first you have to undo the spring pack, best way to do this is take a c clamp and place the clamp next to the alignment bolt an tighten it down, then remove the nut, bolt and spring clamps. then you can slowly remove the c clamp. this way it doesnt pop apart and and take any by standers out. then take the lower spring with the eyelets and lay it on somewhat smooth and flat part of a concrete floor. take chalk, soap stone, or a marker and trace the shape of the spring onto the floor, its hard to see but look close and you can see the outline

then take the spring and measure off 1 inch increments on the spring. then place the spring in a shop press and start in the center flattening out the spring on your marks. here is a pic of one side started laying next to the out line.


keep working the spring until it is pretty flat

now you can begin to reshape the spring back wards, which will reverse the eyes. take it slow and dont over bend the spring or it will just make more work. go back to the outline on the floor often to see where you need to bend

once you get the spring to the shape of the out line you can reassemble the spring pack, just reverse the process of taking it apart

and there you have it, a little elbow grease and you have a cheap reversed eye spring. this is how it used to be done by many hot rodders and still works great.

So the main leaf on the springs is not tempered then, I thought they are all tempered and you would not be able to bend them.

They are, but you can stil bend them. We did it pretty much as Cornfield shows, except we marked lines on the leaf every inch and put the exact same number of pumps on the handle of the press on each line. That way we got a totally uniform reshape on the spring.

Good thread, thanks for posting it.

Don

i also put marks on mine every inch, they are in sharpie so they are kinda hard to see

One way to temper springs is use a junk aluminum block and a big hammer. take your time and work from the center. This tends to rearch the spring.

reversing spring eyes

Good artical in march 2011 Rod and Custom. Sugest you read, very good info.

dannronn said:

Good artical in march 2011 Rod and Custom. Sugest you read, very good info.

Click to expand...

Just read that myself, it had some interesting things to ponder.