Making a spring from steel wire

I need to make two springs to pop open the lid of my project box when I energise a relay.

No matter how hard I tried, I cannot make a spring as shown in the diagram. The one I made is too "tall" as shown at the bottom.

What is the secret of make such spring?

Edited: Apparantly I need to use some tools(instead of just winding the wire by hand on a drill bit) in order to coil the wire. The answer is in the following webpage.

**broken link removed**

Nice, thanks for sharing the link.

Hiya,
I found the easiest way to make springs is by using a lathe setup in screw cutting mode. Just set the pitch to the pitch of the spring and make up a simple jig to tension and feed the wire. As for bending the ends just apply a BIT of heat not too much and bend them with pliers. I remember back in my school days the teacher tried to make a spring and got the spring steel embedded in his hand and didn't he see red when I got up and showed him how to make one properly. Well I did learn to use a lathe when I was 8 years old thanks to my late mech engineer father.
Oh and I don't bother making them anymore as I have 100's sitting round in a few boxes.


Cheers Bryan

That works too , Bryan..
years ago i worked at a place that had a sprng making machine, the trick was to start with a roll of spring steel..
then this machine fed it into a device which bent it to the desired dia. and length and cut it off..