Since Dylan lost steering after a minor accident on December 27, 2008, his car has been in the garage where my car SHOULD be.\u00c2\u00a0 He actually managed to break the “rack” as in “Rack and Pinion Steering” –\u00c2\u00a0 snapped it in right in half — the steering wheel turned with no connection to the wheels.\u00c2\u00a0 Sigh.\u00c2\u00a0 The shop wanted $1800 to fix it, which is more than the car is worth, so I figured I’d give it a try. \u00c2\u00a0 If I could fix it, great.\u00c2\u00a0 If not, the Kidney Foundation will give you $50 and tow it away.<\/p>\n
So, I spent the winter scraping windows and warming up my car despite having a nice warm spot in the garage intended for an ADULT car.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, today I FINALLY got the steering gear out of the silly thing.\u00c2\u00a0 In the Haynes book it always looks SO simple. ” Just remove these four bolts, and these two hoses and away you go”.\u00c2\u00a0 But, as most of you know, there’s ALWAYS a hitch.\u00c2\u00a0 One fool nut that I COULDN’T get off and I ended up rounding badly.\u00c2\u00a0 So annoying.\u00c2\u00a0 Yesterday I ended up taking a drill to it to cut as much as I could off it and then WHACKED it with a screwdriver and hammer until the nut cracked and came off.\u00c2\u00a0 VICTORY!\u00c2\u00a0 Kinda.<\/p>\n
The next “easy step” was removing the power steering hoses.\u00c2\u00a0 I couldn’t for the life of me get them to budge either –\u00c2\u00a0 Release-All and everything.\u00c2\u00a0 Nothing.\u00c2\u00a0 On my friend George’s suggestion I went out today and bought a “line wrench”.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just like a regular closed wrench, but with a notch cut at the end to get it over a line.\u00c2\u00a0 Worked like a charm and the steering gear is out.\u00c2\u00a0 Putting it back in should be easy — SHOULD BE.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ll see.<\/p>\n
It’ll need an alignment when I’m all through, and the tie rod ends were totally shot, so it’s probably good to replace those, but they’re cheap.\u00c2\u00a0 All told, it’ll be about $300.\u00c2\u00a0 Not bad.\u00c2\u00a0 Hopefully we can sell it for a grand or so and be done with it.<\/p>\n
Hopefully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since Dylan lost steering after a minor accident on December 27, 2008, his car has been in the garage where my car SHOULD be.\u00c2\u00a0 He actually managed to break the “rack” as in “Rack and Pinion Steering” –\u00c2\u00a0 snapped it in right in half — the steering wheel turned with no connection to the wheels.\u00c2\u00a0…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.squids.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.squids.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.squids.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.squids.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.squids.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.squids.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":554,"href":"https:\/\/blog.squids.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions\/554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.squids.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.squids.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.squids.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}