Aero mirrors spring won't compress
 

just got my new aero 993 mirrors back from the painter trying to assemble them but i cant get the spring in the center of the pivot to compress enough to connect the top to the base. any one done this before? would prefer to accomplish this without scratching the new paint.

You can try putting the springs in a vice compressing them fully. Leave them for a couple of days. This will help relieve the tension of the bnew spring.

It still will be a total He11 to put together though. It takes a couple of strong guys to put it together.

Factory has a special tool.

Good Luck !

I made a little tool out of washers and treaded rod as shown in a previous thread and never could get it to work. We finally got it with a vise grip like clamp my body shop guy had. Keep trying, you'll figure out a way.

just hope they arent so scratched up when i'm done that they need to be painted again

I think that you can heat the spring with a torch, which will cause the spring to not be as hard to compress. Some machinists may want to chime in here, as I am not well schooled in metallurgy.

I did it with a homemade spring compressor. It has to be just right to work. There's an article in Excellence that shows how to do it. Do a search here on this topic and the thread should come up. I'm in Miami and you can borrow my compressor if you want to.

ok thanks!!