Tightening-up the steering and front camber

After a week of doing not much, I set to trying to reduce the vibrations I believe are coming through the front end as the situation is improved after cleaning off the wheels, but should be better. I started off with the steering column and seeing as I have not had much luck the replacement bushes you can buy I decided to copy Dave and make up some PTFE bushes, which are almost three times longer than the originals, so much better now.




Further down the steering shaft the joint was replaced with one from Bill at Rarebits.




The only problem was that the new one was 10mm longer, not usually a problem for a standard car, but I had moved the steering rack over to the right as far as possible to give more space for the exhaust. This meant there was not enough space between the suspension tower and the upper pinch bolt of the steering joint. I tried for a time to work out how I could reduce the diameter of the joint to make it clear, but in the end I decided to weld it on to the lower steering shaft. The assembly can still be removed from the car without destroying anything.




The front end vibrations have now reduced, but I have now tracked down slackness in the steering rack, so one of the next jobs will be to try and remove some of that slack by removing a shim or two, otherwise I shall pick up another rack and re-build that in readiness to drop in the GT6.

Following Johns suggestion I bought some 1/2" aluminium bar, cut it down to length and drilled it to suit the lower wishbone arms.




It does look a lot better now as there is a greater surface area contact between the wishbone bracket and the chassis.