Mick Annick
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- Burgundy, France (450 miles SE of Somerset)
A bit of advice please chaps.
I’m overhauling the front-end of my Morgan – it needs king pins and bushes which are being sorted on my visit to the UK next month, plus all four track rod ends.
At the controle technique last week the guy gave me an advisory for tracking and play in the steering – there is no play at the steering wheel but my French isn’t good enough to get into a technical argument, so I accepted it.
On stripping the front end, I noticed there was a bit of vertical movement on the inner track rod ends where they enter the steering rack – no loose bolts so I removed the rack to investigate. It’s a very basic Jack Knight item – a steel rack inside an aluminium tube, with the tie rods bolted through a rubber gaiter with a couple of apparently mild steel spacers keeping everything where it should be.
There is some apparent wear on the spacers – there’s flat spots on them – though no appreciable wear on the aluminium tube; this is a known issue with these racks.
Parts are unobtainable, others with the same issue have turned down the spacers and made a loose-fitting sleeve to take up the wear, though no-one has apparently had the tube machined to restore parallelism to the wearing edges.
What is the best solution?
1. I can refit the spacers and rotate them 90 degrees so we’re back to an unworn portion, though there will still be a bit of wear in the tube, though less than 1mm.
2. I could find someone with a lathe to turn up some new spacers – received wisdom (in Morgan circles at least) is they needed to be hardened, but as this is steering thus ‘safety critical’ are non OEM spacers wise? Having seen the quality of the rack I’m actually quite relaxed about this as there’s two ½” bolts that actually secure the track rods via a couple of 3mm metal plates, so even if a spacer were to fail on its own loss of steering is very unlikely.
3. Buy a new Quaife rack from the factory - £1,000+
Even if I refit exactly as it was, there is no slop at the wheel in the steering and it would pass the CT.
The attached photo is of the Quaife rack which is almost identical, the only difference is the spacers on mine are top hat in shape rather than domed like this one.
Any thoughts?
I’m overhauling the front-end of my Morgan – it needs king pins and bushes which are being sorted on my visit to the UK next month, plus all four track rod ends.
At the controle technique last week the guy gave me an advisory for tracking and play in the steering – there is no play at the steering wheel but my French isn’t good enough to get into a technical argument, so I accepted it.
On stripping the front end, I noticed there was a bit of vertical movement on the inner track rod ends where they enter the steering rack – no loose bolts so I removed the rack to investigate. It’s a very basic Jack Knight item – a steel rack inside an aluminium tube, with the tie rods bolted through a rubber gaiter with a couple of apparently mild steel spacers keeping everything where it should be.
There is some apparent wear on the spacers – there’s flat spots on them – though no appreciable wear on the aluminium tube; this is a known issue with these racks.
Parts are unobtainable, others with the same issue have turned down the spacers and made a loose-fitting sleeve to take up the wear, though no-one has apparently had the tube machined to restore parallelism to the wearing edges.
What is the best solution?
1. I can refit the spacers and rotate them 90 degrees so we’re back to an unworn portion, though there will still be a bit of wear in the tube, though less than 1mm.
2. I could find someone with a lathe to turn up some new spacers – received wisdom (in Morgan circles at least) is they needed to be hardened, but as this is steering thus ‘safety critical’ are non OEM spacers wise? Having seen the quality of the rack I’m actually quite relaxed about this as there’s two ½” bolts that actually secure the track rods via a couple of 3mm metal plates, so even if a spacer were to fail on its own loss of steering is very unlikely.
3. Buy a new Quaife rack from the factory - £1,000+
Even if I refit exactly as it was, there is no slop at the wheel in the steering and it would pass the CT.
The attached photo is of the Quaife rack which is almost identical, the only difference is the spacers on mine are top hat in shape rather than domed like this one.
Any thoughts?
. Oddly there’s more wear in the spacers that there is in the rack.
