Steering Rack Problems
If there is a knocking noise from the left hand side of your front suspension and you have already changed the left trunnion, top ball joint and the track rod joint, you are going to be scratching your head about now, I was, so I replaced the complete steering rack for a reconditioned one bought off EBay (where else?).
Having done some research, there
are three other things that I could have considered.
1.
How are the metal bushes in
the left hand shock absorber lever arm?
2.
How good are the rubber
bushes that mount the steering rack to the bulkhead?
Difficult to tell without removing the rack, but if they’re perished
you’ll have to change them. They
are shared with Triumph Dolomite and Spitfire and so are readily available and
you can buy up rated polyurethane versions.
3.
There’s a nylon bush inside
the left hand end of the rack that wears oval over time and sometimes breaks up
inside its metal sleeve. This
allows the nearside end of the steering rack to rattle against the bush and
because the rack tube is mounted to the bulkhead - it reverberates through the
car.
In the last couple of years have
spoken recently to a number of
The traditional solution has been to buy an exchange rack or a source a rack from a scrapped car. I have been able to track down the part number and have spoken to a number of steering rack reconditioners in the hope of buying the bush or a rebuild kit, but without success. The BL garage workshop manual shows how to do the repair, but without a source of bushes, what can be done? After a lot of searching of the internet, I found that an Australian company had created a polyurethane bush for Australian Marina owners many moons ago. I sourced a bush and set out to fit it myself.
The Haynes manual doesn’t tell you how do the job, but the BL garage workshop manual gives a good outline. First remove the rubber bellows from each end and then dismantle the nearside end of the rack. The most difficult part was to remove the peened metal from the slots on the rack inner and the end cap, a little perseverance with a fine cold chisel shifted it. Once done, I dismantled the rack gearing, so that I could withdraw the rack inner. Once the inner was removed, I took out the little screw which secures the bush I was trying to remove.
The next question was how to get
the old bush out; what I did was to drop a long socket (11/16ths fitted
perfectly) down the rack outer from the right hand end and then stand it on end
and used the steering rack and a soft hammer to gently drift out the bush by
tapping the back of the socket.
The rest was really a reversal of
the dismantling process, it just took longer getting the bearings and shims in
place.
Altogether, doing it for the first
time took about two and a half hours.
If you want to do the same to your rack, I have imported some of the
polyurethane bushes from