I bought a set of springs sight-unseen and was disappointed when they arrived missing half the bushings on each. The seller explained that he had bought VBP springs that came without bushings, so his mechanic cut the bushings off these (but only half, for some reason?) and used them to install the VBPs. He apparently didn't know this wasn't a normal thing and was surprised that I considered it a problem. Anyway, it's a nice clean set of low-mileage springs, and instead of going through the trouble of shipping them back, I decided to keep them and try to make them work by reusing the bushings from my old springs.

Has anyone cut these bushings off before? The guy who removed them did a pretty clean job, but it seems like he cut through the very bottom of the rubber and left most of the adhesive on the spring. My best idea so far is to use a wire saw, like the kind you would remove a windshield with, then re-attach them with 3M Window-weld urethane adhesive. If anyone has any other ideas on how to cleanly remove & re-attach these bushings, I'd love to hear them.

Here's a picture I took after cleaning off the remaining rubber with a razor blade, so you can see what I'm dealing with:

 

Hey, just an update to this. I got a good idea from a friend to use a fillet knife; they are thin, flexible, and sharp. I bought a cheap one, and it worked great! I removed the isolators from my old springs with the fillet knife and glued them to the new springs with Windo-Weld. Almost 2 years later, they are still perfect. Hope this helps someone!