[justincampbell]

What's the deal with the steel plate on the bottom of my leaf spring pack for my '73 FB? I've seen these before but never really thought much about them.
The thing that got me thinking about this was that I had 2 sets of springs side by side, both of them removed from '73 Firebirds. One set has the steel plate and the other does not. I'm told that the one's with the plate(off my project car) were replacements, not OE.
Did OE have these plates? I'm assuming not because the spring mounting plate seemed like it had compressed the spring insulator pads to the max and was still bowed a little to tighten all the way up.
Before I started tearing this car apart the springs seemed to be quite good(and actually sit similar to the correct OE springs). If I remove that small steel plate(so that the spring mounting plate tightens up without bowing), is that going to shorten the life of the spring or screw up my ride height?

[justincampbell]

Anybody?

[73 TRANSAM]

That small plate is only there to act like a spacer. But if its preventing you from properly tighten the Ubolts then you can remove it.