Front spring and shackles

I'm just curious if these are sitting right or if the spring has lost some of its spring quality in the time its been on the earth:



Thats the angle of both shackles with just the frame sitting on the front end. The spring has been reversed. Me and my father standing on it get the shackles pretty close to hitting and we are nowhere near the weight of the motor that is going up front.

Is it time for a new spring or am I overlooking something simple?

 

How many leafs do you have now??

 

Excluding the main spring itself, six, I only have two of them still out of the pack.

 

You cannot just take a spring and stick it in a fixed distance and expect it to fit correctly with out knowing how much the spring will gain length under a load. If your spring appears to have the correct loaded angle but the load defects the arch so that the shackles bottom out, you probably have too long a spring.

Now you can figure this out but using "backyard mechanics" and you can expect to have a spring like yours under compression, gain about 1 1/2" in deflection.

To garage check your spring for load and length gain, take it out and place the spring upright on the floor measure the free height and span, then have someone with a known weight stand on the center of the spring with full weight and measure the defection both in height and length gain. (Example "Bigg Louie" weighs 200 lbs, stands on the spring, it compresses 1" in height and displaces 2".) Now install the shackles in the perches place them at a 45* angle and measure the span of the two shackles, move the shackles to perpendicular and re measure the span. (45*= 30" vs 90*=31") If you compare the length of the spring under load to the shackle distance under load you can determine if your main leaf is to long or too short. (example Spring length loaded 29" -too short, spring length loaded 32"- too long). The arch of the spring and the material also have a lot to due with defection but this is a simple way to check the approximate spread on your spring. I'm sure someone has another way to do this but this is a simple way that you can do with no special tools or fancy math. Since both you and your dad both stood on this and it just went to 90*, that is a lot of load so you are probably in the ball park. Continue your build before you alter the spring.

Even after this you still will have to determine the load rate of the spring but that is another deal.