Steve Taxi
Senior Member
One of our C Class w203's had a knocking from the osf last week and it turned out to be a broken road spring. I picked one up from stock at the local dealer for 41 quid, not bad I thought then the grief started, the strut came off easy but here is my first bit of advice, you remove the 17m nut under the bonnet but its not clear that this is the only thing holding the strut together, I was lucky that the top mount was a bit seized and it didnt explode till I had it on the bench and nobody was in the firing line, then I looked at the new spring length and worked out it had to be compressed to a quarter of its size to fit it into the strut, I tried 2 compressors but this wasnt going to work so I tried 4 but as you start to get near, "boing" and count your fingers, I gave up with the compressors before someone died, I noticed there are 2 holes in the bottom spring plate so I made up 2 lengths of threaded rod put nuts on 1 end and 2 shaped plates to hook over the coils, I then wound in the spring evenly with the threaded rods until I could fit the top plate and nut, then refit the strut to the car, the top nut passes through the hole, let the car down so you can remove the top nut and fit the plate under the bonnet, job done but the next one will take a quarter of the time, hope this saves someone a lot of grief as this site has helped me many times in the past, Steve.
