240Z: Steering column assembly

Last few evenings i’ve been working on the assembly of the steering column. Started with the delivery of the freshly sandblasted and painted housing parts:

The steering colum mount still had the old glue inside so i tried a few methods to clean it but figured out the “solvent cleaner” (which is actually an industrial grade label-sticker remover) works brillant compared to the dremel-and-wire-wheel method 😛

this was the result after wiping it a few times. see before picture above:

Next was glueing the old and cleaned rubber insulators back in. they where still quite nice and soft and no new ones available so i decided to reuse them:

I put the plastic piece from the steering lock and the two bearings into the fridge to get them minimized a bit and at the same time put the housing on my radiator to warm and expand it slightly for a few hours:

After that it was quite easy to hammer the bearings and the plastic piece back into the housing carefully with a wooden hammer and the professional tool (aka the big wrench nut and expander) 😀

After cleaning all the small bits and regreasing them i had them back into the housing as well (thanks to the help of my girlfriend, because it’s impossible to compress the spring and at the same time install the lock-ring – trust me. i tried for about an hour 😛