Hi Keith, if there turns out to be a circlip or something similar at the top of the spindle to keep it from moving downward, it can be a tricky process to get them out in confined spaces. Screwdrivers usually are fairly central to my efforts in those situations, but once in a while you have to grind a piece of scrap into a strange shape to make a special tool. I agree boltcutters are sometimes the tool of choice for cutting things like springs, but I have a large pair of boltcutters that now have silver-soldered high speed steel cutting edges, following an incident with a large padlock. There are limits, even with boltcutters. (I cut the padlock easily enough, but the repair time on the boltcutters made me wish I'd had a portable generator so I could have used an angle grinder instead, to do the cutting.)
