Has anybody dropped their car by heating the stock springs? Is this even possible with are cars? If I'm not retarded and this is possible,how can it be accomplished and is it safe?

Thanks.

 

i think people stopped doing that to cars in 1993 when people didnt know better.
do it if you want, but have fun bouncing around all crazy down the street.

i can still see ford escorts everywhere slammed to the ground bouncing like basketballs down the road... oh the horror!

 

Like crucial said you will bounce like crazy. Don't do it, just save money and buy springs.

 

1)When you heat your springs you kill the spring rate. Meaning the spring no longer works.
2) If you heat up and destroy them they'll cost about as much as lowering springs to replace.

So like mal75 said just buy springs and save yourself the trouble. We have a sale going on for our hotchkis springs if you're interested............

http://www.trdsparks.com/displaypart...1&parts_id=477

 

Yah, it was always a bad idea to heat any coil spring. Exception might be if you were a metallurgical expert.

See, the steel wire was heat treated to a proper, safe and durable temper (springy-ness) before or after it was coiled into its present shape.

When you heat above about 650F, the spring temper goes away; the steel molecules lose their tempered alignment. This makes the steel dead soft. That removes the resilience (springy-ness) and creates dead metal highly subject to fatigue.

In theory, at least, such a mistreated spring could even fracture, break suddenly.


---sidebar: In the case of leaf springs, rodders can and do alter the spring's length or eye by heating and bending. But here this is not a problem because that is not an active area of the spring. In the case of old, tired, sagged leaf springs, the generally accepted way to 'restore' them is to cold-bend in order to 're arch'.

If a spring is heated to alter its shape then it really should be -heat treated- again to restore it's spring action. I don't know anyone who can do that with precision outside of a specialist facility. And, too, modern coil springs are, I think, about all coiled up -COLD- from precisely tempered wire that is springy to an extent, that the coiling process adds the final degree of spring action to the steel itself.

That is, steel of a spring temper gains more spring stiffness by cold forming.

Heating spring steel even to a straw color (yellow, about 450F) will alter its spring temper towards soft.

In heat treating carbon steel for spring duty (whether a clock mainspring or truck leaf spring), the steel would be heated to a red glow, quickly quenched to cold. Now the metal is hard and brittle and too hard for spring duty. The next step is heat treatment to -draw down the temper- to a moderate point. If we polish a piece of glass-hard quenched steel and then apply non-oxidizing flame to it (an oven is used in practice), the metal man watches the silver polish go thorough a range of colors beginnning with straw yellow (about 450F) and on up to the high six hundreds (pale blue). Above that temperature the color disappears and so has the spring temper.

Most generally, heat treated springs would have their temper drawn down to a dark blue color.

----modern practices are much more sophisticated than this descriptive. Springs are probably all "treated" in the state of the raw stock at the mill. The final forming gives the final "temper" to the metal and this is allowed for in the alloying and heat treatment processes at the mill.

 

Have you ever seen those "rice" looking cars that were super low and bounced around on every little pebble on the road. That's the result of heated springs. It doesn't look good unless you are sitting still and it definitely isn't good for you. I imagine chiropractors don't mind it though.

 

some people also go cheap about it and cut their stock springs...

people arnt too smart...

get the trd springs and struts. its a subtle drop that looks good (atleast on the tC)

 

I was one of them.... in thought, anyway!

I was thinking that I could drop the xB's rear by cutting the spring shorter.
Ah! No! The rear springs are coiled to smaller diameter top and bottom to fit into the cups.
This means, that if I were to cut off coils I'd have to cold-form the cut end back to the factory diameter. That would be hard to do outside of a machine shop, to say the least.

so, yeah, fuggetaboutit! Heating would not be an option because that would make a dangerous fatiguing point in the spring... removing the temper, the spring could shear there suddenly and plop the rear down and because there's no rubber bump stop, the shock would die, right? I suppose so.

 

never never never do that
when springs are made they are tempered
so they are stronger and whe you heat them
you take the temper out of the spring making
it weaker not only is it dangrous if your
springs snap when you are on the road but
when the spring snaps the wheel will slam into the wheel
well breaking it and you will pop the tire

 

DO IT!!