Just about all of us here at Hooniverse tinker with our own cars. We do a lot of stuff. Tim does all the stuff, but some things are better left to the professionals, because some things may not be good for our health. Swapping suspension coil springs and/or struts was always one of those risky things for me. I have been hearing folktales of mechanics being killed by springs my whole life, so I stay far away from them.
Typically, when swapping coil springs and/or struts, I’d spend half of my Sunday removing all four strut assemblies from the car. Then I would drop all four of them off at a shop. Then I would go back home to bring the new parts, which I forgot on the first trip. Then, a pimply-faced kid at the shop would take them apart, replace needed parts, and put them back together for me, often not forgetting how everything went back together. Then I would just put the whole assemblies back in the car next weekend, after riding a bike to work for a week, put the wheels back on, realize that I forgot something, take everything apart again, realize that I need to swap three other things “while there”, curse, take care of the bleeding, assemble everything, and then take a day off work to have the car aligned. Easy.
But some people are not like me. Some people are just plain stupid, and they stupidly attempt to fix everything themselves. The above video, which I think comes to us from Russia, a place where they often like to take unhealthy shortcuts in order to get things done quickly and efficiently, while smoking, shows a handy homemade spring compressor that makes swapping those pesky struts a breeze. This may be just be the thing for you idiots who insist on doing stupid/dangerous things like that yourselves. The amount of compression is dependent on the length of your bar and the weight of your ass. Yes, there are little clamp-y springs compressor thingies, and big wall-mounted springs compressors, but this is way, WAY, faster, and seems safer, kind of, not really.