I ran mine for most of a couple of gallons before I knew that I didn't have the spring on mine. The only reason I found I didn't have it was I started getting a glitch that we were tracking down and found the spring was not there. BTW it wasn't glitching because of the lack of a spring, it was because I had a bad regulator feeding back to the rx through my jomar kill switch. Replaced the regulator and problem went away.