Front coil spring compressor?

[pritch]

I've recently been putting my front end back together, drop spindles, disc brakes, new coils, the whole thing. I had a dickens of a time compressing my coils. I built this tool:



That is a 3/4" threaded rod and 2 pieces of half inch plate. This is one of my old springs, I didn't take any pictures of doing the new ones. I would like to say it worked well, but all I can say is that it kinda worked. If I took what I learned and built a new one, I would have put some twist in the top steel plate to match the angle of the coil a little better and used left-handed threaded rod so it would get tighter instead of wanting to un-wind it's way down the spring and get looser. As much as I could compress the spring, it still wasn't enough and I had to use a bar clamp between the control arms to get the last little bit so I could get the ball joint nuts to start.
So I did get everything together and I was pretty happy.

Then it was pointed out that I had the bolts upside down in the upper ball joints. The bolts are supposed to be head down, instead of head up.

The shop mechanic at my work had offered to let me use his coil spring compressor tool before hand, so I decided to take him up and this is what he has:



I didn't see a brand name, but I assume this is a good tool. He's the kind of guy that would sooner set fire to a dollar bill as to give it to Harbor Freight.

The problem was that there is no way this would work. It's waaaay to long. I took it apart and made some shorter threaded rods for it:



This was better. This worked for what I was doing. I just needed to hold the springs, just compress enough to relieve the pressure off the ball joint:



I still couldn't compress the spring completely enough, so I still had to finish it with the trusty bar clamp. With this tool this short, there is no way I could have even come close to starting from scratch. No way I could have opened it enough to release the tension on the spring.

But now it's all back together and life is good, but I'm left wondering what is the proper tool to use for this operation?