Steering shaft upgrade
NOT meaning to highjack thread ... BUT is there something you can buy ... to eliminate the factory joint for a manual steering system ?
By the way .. nice fab!
Sort of. And its not a hijack, that's actually why I did what I did with this fab.
You can buy a steering u-joint that will go from the 3/4" 36 spline or 5/8" 36 spline steering box to a 3/4" round, which is what the steering shaft is at that point. You just trim the end of the steering shaft to the right length.
The problem is that you either need to weld that joint onto the end of the steering shaft, or drill it and put a pin in. I don't like the pin, because if its not a perfectly round hole and the proper tolerance for the pin you'll end up with slop in the steering system. So, you basically need a machine shop to do it right, its not a typical do it at home operation. Or you need to weld it, which means you're not changing that u-joint any time soon. The steering u-joints for round ends are intended for racing, and intended to be welded.
Or you can buy a really expensive adaptor from flaming river, but even that just goes up higher to the 1" diameter section of steering shaft, and then has the same pin or weld issue.
The other issue is that the stock coupler slides up and down, which the u-joints won't do. So, if you incorporate a u-joint without a telescopic section you could, IN THEORY, introduce a binding problem when the chassis flexes, or wear out the steering box or u joint prematurely because of those stresses. Now, on an A body, with the steering angles that are set up from the factory, I'm not sure that part of it would be a big deal. Plenty of people run just a plain steering U joint with no sliding/telescoping section. For me, I just really dislike the pin that holds the u-joint to the shaft when its done like that. Its not a hand drill, or even a drill press type operation, it should be machined to be an interference fit with the pin to do it properly. If there's
any slop between the pin and the hole, ie, anything other than a press fit, the pin and hole will wear and introduce play. And eventually ruin the steering shaft too.
The other way to swap it over to a steering u-joint would be to have the 3/4" round section at the end of the steering shaft machined into a DD shaft. That just requires milling some flats into the solid round tube. Then you'd just use a 34" 36 spline to 3/4" DD steering U joint, and that would eliminate the pin or weld issue. But it would still require a little machine work. You can probably grind the flats into the shaft also, but then you're traveling back down the path of introducing slop in the system if you don't grind everything true and flat.
This is all stuff I thought about when I did my modification. You could also weld in a section of 3/4" DD shaft to the end of the steering shaft, but then you're cutting and welding and still haven't addressed the up/down movement issue. Which is why I decided to weld in a section of telescoping DD shaft. Solves all the issues, and doesn't require a machine shop as long as you're careful to make sure the ends of the shaft stay aligned.
