Avoiding spring on 3rd elevator stage

[bradtech519]

I've been going to the point where I am making it to the 3rd elevator stage on Mame & arcade.  Today I was playing my best game ever since starting on 8/10/18 which was 10 days ago.  I had 85k & 3 men left. I lost all 3 men/lives on the spring.  I was taking two steps forward at the top, waiting for a spring to load on the gold squad below Kong, and taking off running. Seems like a 2nd spring killed me each time before I could make it to the gold squad below kong.  I've watched youtube videos and read other posts.  Seems like I have a mental block going on.  I've came a long way in 10 days but this seems to be the hardest road block for me.  I made it  back to the barrel board before it & got taken out by 2 wild barrels with two lives remaining. What kind of strategies or methods did you guys use when starting out to get past this stage? I had a goal of 100k by this Friday 8/24/18. I guess I could try doing save states on just this level. 

[bradtech519]

oops, looks like I missed this  https://donkeykongforum.net/index.php?topic=492.0

Just saw it after posting.

[d3scride]

Save state for sure until you get comfortable enough with spotting when to go/retreat. Oddly enough once you figure that screen out you should basically never die on it.

[bradtech519]

I had enough time to get 3 games in today on an arcade cabinet.  I nailed it 3 of 3 times.  I still don't think I have the retreat mental/muscle memory down yet.  Could be that I got lucky the times I did on the arcade cabinet.  I play mostly on a keyboard at home.  But when I get on the cabinet I seem to do even better than I do at home on mame.  I scored 120,400, 110,700, and 96,600.  The speed of the flames on the pie factory kind of caught me off guard.  Another time I got nailed twice on the 2nd to top girder trying to get the hammer.  Could have done better if some randomized things went more my way.