Puzzle on tie rod adjustment
- Thread starter AR67GTX
- Start date
Blind mechanic may be the problem here. I'm going to swing by after work to see if they are there and if they have discovered anything. I'm pretty sure his steering box input doesn't have a double width index spline. It's obviously mis-clocked. With the gear box centered, the drive pin in the coupler is on the side in a horizontal position - rather than up and down. I did the shoving from inside the car to engage it as he steadied it and aligned the two form the engine side. I was laying on the floor supporting the column with my right hand while putting some push on it with my left hand. I'm not big enough to have pushed it on if it had a mis-aligned spline. But, we can deal with this later. This has got to be something in the pitman arm installation or a funky tie rod end issue.
Strange - I frequent the FE forum as I have a stroked 428 Cobra replica and someone on there has the same problem with a 66 Fairlane. His gear box is centered but on one side his tie rod sleeve is threaded nearly all the way out and on the other side it's screwed all the way in and bottomed out and neither wheel is straight with the car yet.
That's on the agenda for this Saturday - under the possibility the steering knuckle turn stops are preventing our accurately centering the steering box. Also new tie rod sleeves on order and plan to pull the pitman arm and see if it's somehow capable of being clocked incorrectly.
Well, I think we solved this mystery which was probably more of a momentary lack of critical thinking skills than anything. It appears you can't really center a steering box accurately with the drag link hooked up and the car on stands with the suspension drooping. It appears the knuckle/lower ball joint strut will hit and limit travel well before the box will hit it's stops and it may be considerably different side to side. Once we dropped the link off the pitman arm we found the box was just barely shy of 6 turns side to side instead of 4-1/2 and we ended up with a considerably different center of box reference point - maybe a third of a turn off. So after reconnecting and dropping the car back down and cycling the suspension side to side a couple times the tie rods adjusted out just fine and pulled the wheels in straight.
And surprise, surprise, when we finally removed the horn unit off the steering wheel we could find the double spline on it which was sort of beat up and obscured from the column side. Installing it correctly on the column lined it up with the index mark on the coupler (which was about 120 degrees off center now). So driving the pin out of the coupler and re-aligning the coupler and the centered box put everything looking good. Except the coupler keeps wanting to come apart like the steering shaft is being held slightly back too far and we just got too hot and tired to work on the damn, greasy thing any longer and gave up for the day. But the main mystery or self imposed issue is solved.
And surprise, surprise, when we finally removed the horn unit off the steering wheel we could find the double spline on it which was sort of beat up and obscured from the column side. Installing it correctly on the column lined it up with the index mark on the coupler (which was about 120 degrees off center now). So driving the pin out of the coupler and re-aligning the coupler and the centered box put everything looking good. Except the coupler keeps wanting to come apart like the steering shaft is being held slightly back too far and we just got too hot and tired to work on the damn, greasy thing any longer and gave up for the day. But the main mystery or self imposed issue is solved.
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