This is a bushing from the inside of my steering rack. At auto-x on Saturday, the car felt a little off. Not… horribly, but at times I felt an odd pulsation at the wheel, and on the drive home I noticed that the wheel wasn’t dead straight. The post event inspection looked alright however… and it wasn’t until I started adjusting toe, and had the wheels at lock that I noticed a tonne of play in the passenger side wheel.
The tie rods all checked out, and I eventually traced it to some play in the rack. Not in and out play as I would have expected to find(i.e. play in the gear) but rather the inner shaft was moving forwards to backwards in the rack housing. Praise the internet… because my first reaction was that I would need a new rack, but some readily available diagrams showed that a plastic bushing is the only thing that locates the inner shaft on the passenger side.
So instead of spending $300 on a rack, I spent $14 on a bushing.
With the inner tie-rod removed, the inner shaft can be slid deep enough into the housing to remove the bushing. It’s still not an easy task, the bushing has three pins on it which fit into three holes on the rack housing. One of them is entirely impossible to access with the rack still on the car. And while I was fighting with that…
… a chunk of the bushing broke off and pelted me square in the eye. Pretty dumb. There are four pairs of safety glasses in my garage: one on each bench, and one in each of my tool boxes. In this case, the glasses were lying on the ground beside me because I got sick of fighting to see through them in dark and confined conditions.
Too much opposite lock. You should be more like godhand.