Failure invalid reason?

check it more closely,youll generally find the pig tail at one end of the spring has broken off,check for cracked/uneven ends,the broken section may not even be present.it takes a muppet to fail a component that aint broken so my guess is you aint spotted the fracture,it doesn't have to be large.if you changed both compare them.if however it wasn't broken at all then go back to the test centre with them and complain long and loud,if you get no joy ask for a vt 17 appeal form(they have to give you one on request)and go from there.

Take both old springs to a third party for and opinion. I have had situations where both springs were broken and so looked exactly the same on removal from the car. Maybe the tester missed that the other spring was broken as well. The garage may well ask why you replaced the springs if there was nothing wrong with them and so may not want to pay. Get an opinion anyway for your own peace of mind.

Upload photograph of broken spring please 

Why did you change the springs if there was nothing wrong with them ?

You should have gone back to the test station and asked them to point out exactly what needed doing before wasting your time and money .

As mentioned above it is probably a front one that needs changing and the tester clicked on the wrong button . If this is the case then there is no need to start screaming about it . Give him a break . We are only human .

You could get an appeal form and go down the correct route . This would probably end up with him/her in trouble with DVSA and possibly unemployed in the near future . You would still have a car with a spring that needs replacing at your expense .

Much better to keep calm and go back to the testing station with a smile on your face . You are much more likely to get an apology and possibly the cost of a spring out of them . If you are really nice they may even fit it for you .

This is getting difficult. I'm not saying you were wrong but by changing the springs you've rather cut the ground away from under your own feet. The garage don't seem to have behaved very well but I'm not sure that you now have any grounds for an appeal. I know it's water under the bridge but if only you had checked the springs before you changed them it would have been so much better. Anyway, did they at least give you a pass now?

Can somebody please explain the difference between a fracture and a break ?

At my two biggest local hospitals .. Jimmy's and LGI.. They have 'Fracture' clinics where broken bones are dealt with .
i always thought it was straightforward ... a broken bone was broken . A fractured bone was just cracked .

A VE once told me that a fractured spring was exactly the same as a broken spring .It was he that brought up the fracture clinic thing . Since that day I have never seen the point in having two seperate RfRs . I have seen coil springs that have split at the ends and the splits can sometimes extend as far as around the complete end coil , but i have never seen a spring that was cracked across either it's radial cross-section or its width if it was a leaf spring . Have seen thousands of springs that have snapped . Maybe they should do away with the 'broken' and 'fractured' and just have snapped as an rfR .

I would say it's the other way round. Fractured is when the spring has split yet both parts are still joined together (rarely see this). Broken is when the spring is in two completely separate parts.

Going back to baldrick's analogy of fracture clinics. My daughter recently broke her arm. There's two bones in your arm, a large one and thinner one. According to the hospital she broke the bigger one and fractured the smaller one.