300SE1993

Just took my car to the dealer to get my snow tires mounted and they informed me I have a broken rear spring. I actually did notice a bit of squirrelly handling recently, come to think of it, but just wrote it off to high miles (211K). It recently passed my state inspection so I didn't think anything of it, really. I guess the state missed that.

Wanted to throw this out there as a heads up for all you early W212 owners to have your springs checked, expecially if you notice anything strange with the handling.

I searched the web and found a few other cases of this with much lower miles, but did not find anything on this forum specifically.

Anybody else?

Mud

Over many years I've had 1 stabilizer bar snap and 1 coil spring break. In both cases it appeared that each had a small defect or ding that slowly deteriorated over time. With use and slow corrosion, the steel eventually broke.
IMO this may be what happened to your car - it would probably be prudent to change out both rear springs to get the same spring rate and new parts.
Congrats on the 200k+ miles!

cetialpha5

I replaced mine recently. I think I wrote about it somewhere. Got the springs from FCPeuro, the Lesjofors at about $58 a spring . You can actually do it without a spring compressor. You just need a jack to drop one of the lower control arms, it's basically the same setup as the W211 and there are videos out there on how to do it on a W211. I just noticed mine were lower than they used to be. When I replaced it and had the old and new next to each other, they looked identical, just had more sag in the original one once it was under load. Now my rears are slightly higher than the fronts, time to do the fronts.

GigRig

same here. I actually heard mine snap. It was on the passenger rear. I am thinking about replacing the rear springstrut combo for an aftermarket set, but I am not shure what way to go as far as ride comfort or Preformance. Any advice from anyone?

cetialpha5

The rear uses a shock so there's no strut. Just the strut in the front. FCPEuro still has the springs and you can either do Sachs or Bilstein for the shocks. Sachs was probably oem as they are for the struts. I got Bilstein a while ago as I didn't see the sachs at the time. While I like FCPEuro for their lifetime warranty on all the parts they sell, the Bilstein there is $112 but you can get the same Bilstein at rockauto.com for about $84 and the shock already comes with a lifetime warranty from Bilstein so no need to pay extra for a warranty it already has. Rockauto does charge for shipping though, although you can get a 5% discount code on retailmenot.com which sorta makes up for some of the shipping charge.

https://www.rockauto.com/en/moreinfo...t=7556&jsn=919