OK, I'm going to buck the "do it the right way" trend on this one. Now take
all this with a grain of salt because I did this on my rust bucket TR6 and
not on my good TR6...but I'm considering doing it on the good 6 since the
"traditional way" didn't seem to work all that well.
I pulled the upper steering shaft out of the steering column (after taking
off the steering wheel, and disconnecting the shaft in the engine bay) and
then drove the bushing down the column with a piece of (1 inch I think) wire
conduit (pipe). I did this because for some reason it wasn't in the right
position in the steering column and it was interfering with the turn signal.
So I'm thinking why not just drive another new bushing down the column since
driving the old one FURTHER down the column wouldn't cause a problem (might
even provide some minor additional support) and then put in the new bushing
on top of it hopefully making the steering shaft tighter. Seems to work and
everything even went back together the way it should. Oh, I also used
massive amounts of silicone spray down the steering column to get things to
slide better.
Let me explain my recommendation with this: The first time I did this on
my good 6 I went the traditional (and time consuming) route of changing the
steering column bushings by pulling the steering column, which meant taking
the speedo and tach out along with a few million other things (and screwing
around with those #&*@ security nuts/bolts on the ignition) and ended up
with not that great of an improvement in the tightness of the steering
shaft. Don't know if the new bushings were defective or what but now I've
got the same problem except it added a squeak to the equation and I've had
to attempt to fix the squeak...unsuccessfully mostly. So instead of going
through that long, long process of removing the steering column again I'm
thinking of just driving another bushing in there and hope that Dave Massey
doesn't deduct too many concurs points from me for having three steering
column bushings <g>.
Granted this is quick (not that quick though) and dirty, not to mention just
plain wrong, but it worked for me.
Bud Rolofson
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul J. Burr" <tigerpb@ids.net>
To: <triumphs@autox.team.net>
Sent: Saturday, January 13, 2001 3:33 PM
Subject: TR6 Steering wheel bushing
>
> Thanks for all the replies on the steering column bushings. I'll probably
> bit the bullet and do it right- take the column out.
> Thanks to all!
>
> Paul Burr
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