Hi Rich_Art, there is no built in "make suspension spring" command to do that automatically, but you can use the new Transform > Deform > Flow command to deform a regular helix into something like that.

It starts out like this, with a regular helix and a simple base plane beneath it:



Then you can run Transform > Deform > Flow and use that plane that's with the helix as the base surface, and the other plane-like surface on the right as the target, it will produce this result:



Note that the spots that you pick on each surface during Flow is significant, it aligns the edges nearest to where you click so click on a consistent side of one edge when you're picking the base and target surfaces for Flow.

The reason why this works is that the target plane is not just a simple 4-corner point plane, instead I drew in a curve that had more control points bunched up near the ends of the curve -that basically produces a stretching of the UV space of the surface and that UV stretching will then be incorporated into the flow.

If you turn on surface control points you can see the how the control point structure of the target surface is different from the base surface:



Note that the surface on the left is a simple plane surface with only 4 corner control points, while the one on the right has more control points in it and they are not evenly distributed, there are more of them at the ends and they are spaced more tightly between each other at the ends.


So with this method you do still need to adjust some control points, but you can do it by just bunching up some points on one straight curve which is much easier to manage than trying to directly edit the control points of the actual 3D helix itself.


Hope this helps!


- Michael