Staying with this split theme, I figured I had enough repairs/mods to write about now. Rather than do a post every time I turn a wrench I figure I will gather several jobs then post about it. With that said all the stuff here has happened over the past couple months/days. I will try to stay in the order they occured but who knows how that will go.
First up. In an effort to try and make second gear stop jumping out and hopefully not require me to rebuild the gearbox (fun story it helped but I still need a rebuild). I decided to go to a semi rigid DSN upper steady bracket. While this bracket made second jump later it still did not correct the issue. Another fun event when installing the steady bar was that my bolt on the engine at some point sheared off. Lucky for me what is normally an engine out fix turned into a front end off moment and I was able to use an easy out to pull the remaining part of the bolt out. I have no idea when this broke but what little thread I was using with the bolt finally gave up and I wasn’t able to secure the steady bar.
Next on my list of things to do was to make the seats quick release. I know it seems like an odd thing to want, but with the Cobra buckets the tilt feature doesn’t work so well cause they hit the roof. We plan on using the classic for all sorts of adventures and I wanted a way to easily load the rear seat area with larger items. So I got some steel sleeves, some clevis pins, and a few R clips and made it happen. I will say the sleeves actually make the seat hold a bit more rigid than before. I found the bolts were way smaller than the seat bracket holes and when you leave a bit a slack for the tilt feature this lets the seat shift a bit. Not anymore though now all they have is a little side to side movement but no up and down.
The last job I did was most recent. I can’t recall if the steering had extra play in it before I got my alignment but I definitely remember feeling it after. I figured this was just a quirk of a quick rack. Figured I was feeling the slack before the tires bit. Well the other day someone asked the question about steering play and it got me thinking about it. So when I got home from work I decided to investigate. Turns out my play was actually the column shifting on the rack splines (not good and really dangerous from what I was reading). What was odd was I couldn’t feel the same play when testing on the original rack I removed before the resto. Either way I wasn’t pulling the rack and I didn’t trust the column anymore (The splines didn’t look so hot anyways, looked even worse when I got the new one). While I was at it I decided to beef up the pinch bolt as well and put a grade 8 in there, I figure this way its a bit stronger if I have spline failure. I was also extra careful when realigning the column height to make sure I wasn’t binding the splines. Once everything was snugged up I was still able to move the pinch bolt before tightening it up which I read is a good indicator that the column and rack are centered together. The car is now extra twitchy and theres 0 play in the wheel, its almost a bit sticky but thats mostly due to the new column bushing I installed, it will wear a little bit as well and loosen up.
That is all for now, hoping my next post is of me taking apart a gearbox. I should be getting a spare to rebuild so my car won’t have to be down and I can take my time. I might also be rebuilding a 1275 soon, not sure what craziness I want to do with that but we shall see.
The Rust chronicles 