Steering Rack

Brandon came over today to help me remove the steering rack. I showed Brandon where the bolt was to disconnect the rack from the steering column itself and he popped that one off pretty quick. Next we had to remove the tie rods. It seemed like it would be a pretty easy job until we got the dust boots off and saw the size of the tie rod itself. I didn't even have a wrench big enough to fit around it! Off to the auto-parts store (I remembered to buy some gojo while I was there - finally!)

Well, one really big wrench later, we had one of the inner tie rod disconnected from the steering rack. While I worked on the 2nd one, Brandon started working on popping the outer tie rod out of the spindle on the wheel. You do this by hitting it real hard with a hammer - there just isn't much room under there. The instructions specifically say to use a dead blow hammer but since I don't have one, we just started whacking it with a metal hammer. Well, I got the other tie rod off with no trouble and we decided to remove some body panels to give us more swinging room with the hammer. No avail. Before we bent the tie rod bolt up too bad, we decided to go buy a dead blow hammer; trip #2 to the store :-( Every time I spend money on something unexpected, I feel the cobra kit purchase getting further and further away. Sadness.

Anyhow, when we got back, we took the front wheels off and could really get a solid whack on it. unfortunately, the deadblow hammer was too soft and started breaking apart. So I took the metal hammer to it one last time and with a huge 'this sucker is coming off one way or another' swing, broke it loose. Victory! We got everything pulled off and out with no problems from there. Another successful step toward finishing the donor teardown. I really need to stop at some point and clean all these parts up. But that probably wont really happen until I'm waiting for the kit to arrive with nothing else to do.

Anyhow, here is a picture of the front of the car as it is now. The big pieces removed are: radiator, master cylinder, hydrobooster, condensor, steering rack, body panels, wheel wells, and wheels.