It is a common problem for gunsmiths.
Additionally there are numerous ready made coil springs easily purchased on the market.
“Making springs is nowhere near as difficult as you think...
Additionally there are numerous ready made coil springs easily purchased on the market.”
One gathers you’ve not made that many.
Brownells deserves more credit that most of us can possibly imagine, for codifying this stuff into a form comprehensible to postmoderns, publishing it, and selling supplies & equipment that make it possible for untrained people to dabble in the art.
My apologies for insufficient verbal completeness and lack of precision.
It is possible for trained people to make good springs, but it takes time & practice to master the skill. Yet more difficult is the ability to turn out a useful quantity possessed of sufficient quality.
There are large numbers of specialty manufacturers who turn out good numbers of specialized springs; so in one sense the market situation is better than ever. But more and more of these are following the market, toward supplying springs for modern guns, for customized versions of same, and for historic arms or copies (think of the ever-mounting numbers: AR-15 knockoffs, Colt’s Government-Model copies, Ruger Vaqueros, Colt’s SAA etc).
Finding a replacement for the bolt spring on a S&W No 1, or the mainsprings of Merwin Hulbert revolvers, is another story.
And for applications that require a spring more complex than a constant-diameter helical coil, the task is more complex. Springs for the chamber indicators in Walther’s P38 and PP have long tails & curves with multiple radii in more than one plane.
General gunsmithing and repair are a dying part of the profession, in part because the American public doesn’t want to pay the amounts required for sole proprietors and other small operators to support themselves. The liability climate is also unfavorable, the regulatory situation isn’t hopeful, and government hostility (federal and local) poses additional problems. Manufacturers are less willing to sell parts to third parties such as independent repair firms; same with repair & servicing information - for similar reasons.