reversing the eye

I have aftermarket lowering springs on my F1,but want a couple more inches lower,I want to flip the main leaf over to reverse the eyes....I work at a HD truck shop and one of our vendors is Betts Spring,their blacksmith (spring guy) says their is no reason to re-arch the spring after flipping as long as the top and second spring are still in full contact after re-assembling the pack,he mentioned I will have to shorten the 2nd leaf which I can see why after looking close and that most aftermarket lowering springs sit flat or almost negative already so it should work...anyone ever try this without arching?

 

have never done it on my own-but, to go along with reversed eye it is common to de-arch the springs too. research more to find out about possibly removing a leaf or two for more lowering.

 

So the dearching would be for further lowering,not to match up the springs so they both make full contact with no gaps?...they say if you have gaps in the leafs you will have hi stress spots and future breakage...I only have 4 leaves now so cant remove any as these are aftermarket springs already

 

What we have done in the past is lay the main leaf on something flat, like the garage floor and with chalk draw it's shape so you have something to compare it to once you reverse it. Then we drew lines on the spring every inch so we could exert pressure on each of those lines to contour the spring in the opposite direction. We did it with our hydraulic press and as we were reshaping the leaf we did the same number of pumps on the hydraulic ram so the bending was done consistently across the leaf. It only takes a little bit of bending on each of those lines to really reshape the leaf in the opposite direction...less than you would think.

After the entire leaf was reshaped in the opposite direction we laid it back on the chalked outline to see if we were close to the original arc. It took a little playing around to get the exact shape we wanted, but it wasn't really too hard of a job at all. If you tried to do it without those one inch reference marks there would be the possibility of ending up with a main leaf that was bent more in some places and less in others, and be deformed.

As for the second leaf needing shortened, we lucked out and ours was short enough to still clear the eyes on each end. Don't know if you will have that same luck though as every spring is different.

Don

 

After chalking the arch on the floor, I reversed the eyes and rearched my main leaves by hammering them over a piece of well casing 8"-10" pipe stood vertically and moving the leaf back and forth while hammering....could do the same thing on a big vise between the open jaws, hammering between the open space...but like the guy from Betts said," If the leaf is fairly flat just flip and bolt it back in."