A really annoying weekend. While I’m still waiting for my airbag cover to come back from Plush I thought I’d drop my new rear springs in; a nice easy job for the weekend? Wrong.
Half of Saturday was spent looking for my spring compressors and by the time I had found them, with it getting dark so early this time of year I wouldn’t have had enough light to finish. So Saturday afternoon I just fitted all the retrimmed pillars (apart from the b-pillars, which I’m going to redo) and screwed in all the black S4 grab handles. It all looks really nice but I’m struggling to get any good photos with my phone so you’ll just have to take my word on that.
My black S4 rear view mirror was delivered too, so I popped the old beige one off and twisted the mirror mount off the windscreen bracket. I hadn’t bothered sourcing a black mirror mount as I’d planned to paint my existing one. So the final job for Saturday was to rub down the beige mount and give it a few coats of satin black.
On Sunday I got started jacking up the rear end at about 10am. By 7pm I had neither of the springs out, my back hurt from being hunched in a wheel arch all day and I was pretty pissed off with my useless compressors. So not a great day.
My spring compressors are the mechanical type that come in a pair which you wind down on opposite sides to compress the spring evenly. Although slow, they worked fine when Andy and I fitted the front springs a while back (okay, Andy did it, I just handed him tools), but at the rear there just didn’t seem to be any space to be able to get a compressor on each side of the spring.
I even fired up the angle grinder and tried chopping three inches off one of the threads to give me more room to position it. This almost worked, but the thread was winding down towards the lower arm, when the spring was compressed enough that I should have been able to remove it, the thread of the compressor was wedged against the arm so it wouldn’t budge.
No matter where I positioned the compressors, something ended up being in the way, so after a whole days work I had made almost zero progress. That’s ‘almost’ zero progress because I did manage to fit the new rear view mirror, haha (minor productivity win).
Andy wants to switch the springs on his A4 soon, so it looks like we’ll be going halves on a hydraulic spring compressor which ought to do the job quite nicely.
// Matt