I ignore the advice about changing springs in pairs.

I accept the 'new' spring may have different characteristics to the remaining 'old' one, but consider the RH spring has the additional weight of the engine and probably the driver (as most cars spend lots of their time with a single occupant), so the car's unbalanced anyway.

I recall some Fiats (Pandas?) had a spacer on the RH front spring for RHD models, presumably for this reason.

The offside front spring broke on my Ford Mondeo several years ago. On asking the advice of my garage I was informed that it was only necessary to change the broken spring, not both. I had this work carried out and the car drove fine afterwards; no pulling to one side or looking lop-sided when parked. There were no problems with having just the one spring replaced whatsoever.

However, about three years later, the nearside front spring broke! I then wished that I'd had both changed originally, of course. But you just don't know; I might have sold the car on during those three years, in which case it would have been money wasted.

Horses-for-courses, I guess!

I have no comment on the price, i do such jobs myself.

Wackyracer, your sister needs a reality check, suggest you do a lucrative days overtime at work instead next time and let her find out for herself the hard way..:-) I've had to be similarly cruel to be kind with daughter, who despite me requesting her car for servicing for months on end eventually let me have it on a February wet and freezing day, you can be too accomodating sometimes.

For competent home mechanics (i'd still change the pair anyway) and hands on bangernomics owners then doing the bare minimum sometimes makes sense because they will probably have checked out the other side carefully and made a judgement, but for those relying on garages and who never actually stick their heads under the car (and wouldn't know what to look for if they did) it's plainly obvious good sense to fix things like this in pairs.

Someone mentioned tyres and changing one, i would only ever do that when the other one is of similar, preferably identical, type and is almost new itself.

I haven't bought a pair of tyres for years let alone a single, i rotate them to wear them down evenly and buy sets of 4 at a time....usually my spare is the original because i either don't like them or won't pay the premium prices for the makes usually fitted when new.