Leets

So my friends and I tried putting some B&G coils on my 01 ES yesterday, and we ran into some serious problems that I was hoping someone could help us with. The B&G coils seemed to be as big as the stock coils and nearly impossible to compress. We decided to just return the B&Gs and put the stock coils back on, but it took as nearly all day to get the spring compressed enough to mount the strut rod nut.

I've lowered several different cars over the years and have never run into this problem before. My experience has always been that lowering springs are usually quite easy to mount because they dont need to be compressed too much to mount the strut rod nut.

My question is, is it going to be nearly impossible to mount springs without using a hydraulic spring compressor or will other spring designs make installation easier? I'm currently looking at either the Eibachs for the Solara or the Tanabe DF210s. Any help please?