[niky]

In my experience, simply cutting out the springs without considering the rest of the suspension isn't a great thing to do on modern "cheap" cars, because most run with dampers that are too soft to handle the extra stiffness and load of cut springs.

But then, my experience has been mostly with your common cheap Japanese compact, most of which are woefully under-damped. And I drive over really bad roads. Bad enough to have bent eight wheels over the last several years of driving (often at a very reasonable 50-60 mph... our highways are garbage). Cutting springs on these cars makes them ride like skateboards on bedsprings.

If you live in an area with glass-smooth roads and don't do any performance driving, cutting springs (provided you make sure your bump stops are okay, alignment doesn't suffer and you don't take a god-awful amount of spring off) may be okay, but for those who don't live in a perfect world, no. Not really.

And aftermarket springs? Sag? Not any worse than stock springs, and often less... unless you're buying the real cheap stuff, in which case, you're getting what you're paying for. Unfortunately, most aftermarket "lowering" springs are garbage. They lower the car too much and hasten the death of the stock dampers as badly as poorly cut springs. If you're lucky, you can find guides (such as exist on the Honda and Mazda boards) that will tell you which springs have what spring rates, but in most cases, you get zip.

There are other means of lowering the car, too. For instance, suspension changes between the B13 and B14 Sentras means you can use the B13 Sentra front struts on a B14 for about an inch or an inch-and-a-half lowering with no problems other than a slight increase to the Sentra's already considerable propensity to bottom out.

Some good parts scavenging and eBay trolling for "stock sports suspensions" for different variants of your car can achieve similar, if these are available.