Based on the statics theory, a novel and feasible twice-suspended-mass method (TSMM) was proposed to deal with the seldom-studied issue of fault diagnosis for damping springs of large vibrating screen (LVS). With the static balance characteristic of the screen body/surface as well as the deformation compatibility relation of springs considered, static model of the screen surface under a certain load was established to calculate compression deformation of each spring. Accuracy of the model was validated by both an experiment based on the suspended mass method and the properties of the 3D deformation space in a numerical simulation. Furthermore, by adopting the Taylor formula and the control variate method, quantitative relationship between the change of damping spring deformation and the change of spring stiffness, defined as the deformation sensitive coefficient (DSC), was derived mathematically, from which principle of the TSMM for spring fault diagnosis is clarified. In the end, an experiment was carried out and results show that the TSMM is applicable for diagnosing the fault of single spring in a LVS.