Last week I posted a comment about having nearly finished the
installation of my Cobra's front suspension and that all that remained
to complete this task was to reconnect the steering rack to the steering
wheel. This seemed like a trivial job at the time since all it involved
was inserting a shaft with U-joints at either end between the rack and
the steering column shaft. Well, no problem at the rack end, but for
some reason the U-joint at the steering column end doesn't want to slip
onto the steering column shaft's splines. The splines at either end of
the two U-joints slip over the splined end of the rack pinion and the
splined ends of the intermediate shaft fairly easily, so the problem
doesn't appear to be in the U-joints. I've mentioned before that the
steering hardware in a Cobra is essentially the same as in an MGB. The
biggest difference, as far as I can tell, is that Cobras have two
U-joints between the rack and the steering column, while MGBs only have
one. Beyond that, the picture of the steering column shaft in the MGB
steering manual I have looks identical to a Cobra's shaft.
Just for the heck of it I measured the splined ends of the pinion shaft,
intermediate shaft and steering column shaft to see how they compared.
I found that the steering column shaft is a few thousands of an inch
larger than the others. Still, one end of one of the U-joints did fit
over this spline at one time. I tried all four ends numerous times this
weekend and none want to fit now. The U-joints have slits at the
clamping bolt holes which allows a slight bit of expansion, but so far I
haven't been able to expand any of the openings enough to slip onto the
spline.
If anyone has run into this problem on an MGB or any car, for that
matter, I would appreciate knowing how you got around it. I've been
toying with the idea of sanding the very end of the column shaft to a
slight taper, but would prefer a less drastic approach.
Other suggestions welcome.
Thanks,
Roland
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