I turned my attention to the steering gear. The last time I had the car off the ground, I wanted to check the front wheel bearings for play. When I checked the right front wheel, there was a ton of movement. After checking further, I determined that it was not the wheel bearings but rather the steering rack itself.
When researching Panteras prior to buying the car, I had discovered that the steering rack commonly needs to be rebuilt due to an internal bushing that is made of Nylon (or something) that deteriorates over time and allows ridiculous amounts of play in the steering gear on the passenger side. My car was no exception, so I ordered the parts to fix it.
There is an excellent tech article on rebuilding this steering rack on the "Pantera Place" web-site, which is what I used to work my way through this rebuild.
Of course the first thing was to get the rack off the car. This proved to be challenging and apparently I was not the first to try. The pinch bolt on the steering column to Pinion gear joint was already loose. When I went to remove the 4 rack mounting bolts, I found that one of the captured nuts (hidden inside the frame) was no longer captured and the bolt was just spinning freely but would not come out. The tech article on "Pantera Place" says to sell the car if this happens (I think in jest). While that is a little drastic, this will prove to be a pain in the ass to repair. I'll show that in a later post.
At any rate, I was able to get the bolt out with a little luck and the rack off the car, and here it is on the bench in all it's dirty and cruddy glory:
There was easily 3/16" of play in the steering gear so I'm glad I did this.
Next step was to remove the outer tie rod ends and the boots to expose the inner tie rods. There is a locking collar that is staked to prevent the tie rod from coming loose. This staked portion has to be "un-staked" to remove the collar and tie rod. I modified a punch to make this easier.
Then using a couple of pipe wrenches, loosened the collar so I could remove the inner tie rod. After that I needed to remove the pre-load mechanism and pinion gear. Each plate is held on with two 13mm bolts. Then the inner shaft can be slid out of the housing. This is what you have after dissassembly:
Using a long piece of black pipe, I knocked out the old bushing. The old worn out bushing is on the right and the new brass bushing is on the left.
Using an appropriate sized socket, I installed the new bushing along with the set screw and then it's just a matter of assembling in the reverse order. . . except for one problem: The inner steering shaft would not slide freely into the outer case. The outer case was bent! My best guess is that someone lifted the car and had the jack on the steering rack. The old bushing was so warn it didn't matter, but with the new bushing installed, it was a no go.
At this point, I'm really thinking that I'm going to have to buy a new steering gear but they're kind of pricy. I decided to take the housing to work to see if I could straighten it out in a press. I got very lucky and it only took two attempts to get it straight enough for the inner rack to slide freely.
Now I could assemble the rack. And here it is, all back together again, thoroughly cleaned and with new boots:
Now to get it re-installed and and the toe set. I still have that captured nut to contend with. I'll post some pictures of that later.
Thanks for looking.
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