Date:         Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:49:12 -0500
Reply-To:     Max Wellhouse <dimwittedmoose@CFU.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Max Wellhouse <dimwittedmoose@CFU.NET>
Subject:      Steering:  PS Rack U-Joint R&R
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

Folks:  After like 5 years of driving my PS equipped Vanagon(90 GL)
without power steering, the u joint was starting to complain by
clunking around.  No doubt more stress on it as it took more effort
to turn the wheel all those years.  Had a spare once I located it in
a huge conglomeration of used parts I had scattered about, and
cleaned it up and put it on today.  No way to lube it that I could
see, but I won';t be needing it after I replace the ball joints etc.
and convert  to a manual steering rack.

Should any of you have need to do this, Bentley is pretty much no
help and I didn't want to get the British copy of the Haynes manual
greasy, so I just jumped in with both feet. Had the van jacked up
with stands about 12" in the air. Maybe pulling the 4 bolts on the
steering rack would work, but I didn't try that.  First thought was
to try and remove the two 6mm allen head bolts and see if the nose of
the rack would come off and that was obvious pretty quickly that that
wasn't going to work.  So,  I simply removed the windshield washer
bottle, access the two 8mm bolts that hold the rod to the steering
gear transfer box, and tap it towards the center of the van.   Once
that was off, a simple pickle fork tool for tie rod ends separated
the u joint from the steering box after taking out the two 8mm bolts
holding it on.  I pretty much kept things in alignment as best I
could.  The shop vice allowed me to tap the u joint off the steering
rod and I used anti-seize on the splines, since I don't plan on
having it on that long.

There must've been a 1/4" of play in that thing and maybe the wider
Continental tires finally were too much load for the weakened joint
to withstand.  All is better now, at least until I get the rebuild done.

DM&FS