Well said, Josch. Here's some further info for anyone interested in cutting Contour springs: I cut mine while they were still mounted on the car. Here's how: I jacked up the car and took off the wheels. Then I attempted to put on the spring compressors, but the bolts on the spring compressor I rented from Kragen Auto Parts were too long (about 12"), and there wasn't enough room for them inside the strut tower. So I slipped a six-inch long piece of half-inch steel pipe over the spring compressor bolts. The pipe acted as a spacer and kept the bolts from hitting against the top of the spring or the strut tower. Then I just tightened down the spring compressors. Now comes the hard part: you have to cut the coils VERY CAREFULLY because there is not much room to work inside the wheel well, and you have to be careful not to cut into the other coils, or the strut base. I made protective pads out of fiberboard and duct-taped them on the places I wanted to protect. Then I cut the bottom coil off with my angle grinder. Then I removed the cut-off coil from the strut. It takes a little work to remove the cut-off coil, because it gets a little pinched down against the strut base by the remaining spring. I cut the cut-off coil in half to get it off, and then used a floor jack and some pieces of steel pipe to raise the spring enough to extract the cut-off coil. The whole job might have gone much faster if the spring compressors were slimmer so they would fit better in the limited space available, and compressed the spring more. Anyway, the Kragen compressors worked, but just barely. I did the job in three hours, and I didn't have to mess with disassembling the struts, knuckles, tie rod ends, brake lines, etc. Do I recommend it? Well, not really, unless you have better spring compressors than I did. With the spring compressors I used, there really was very little room for error with the angle grinder. And I had to get pretty creative with the floor jack to extract the cut-off coil from the strut.
