This past weekend a friend of mine had what could have been a deadly failure of a reversed steering box he bought off an eBay seller. The seller got the box with a project he bought and never finished, so not sure he's to blame. This post is just a word of warning that, while it's time consuming, anything you install on your hot rod/custom that could cause loss of control if it fails should be checked carefully, even if it involves dis***embly and inspection of the component. Luckily my buddy was just turning into a driveway when it happened, so there wasn't a lot of risk. He just got the car on the road a couple of months ago, nice old Dodge coupe, 318 Mopat and 833 4-speed. WHO THE **** WOULD WELD THE INPUT SHAFT?
Not sure what type of box I'm looking at . Looks to be maybe a Vega . If it is not sure but maybe not reversed . Either way why weld the shaft ? I'm totally lost why in the hell would you do this and thing it will be ok ? I guess the hell with it sell and someone can kill themselves and someone else not even involved with the hobby of building cars . Gives the whole sport a bad name . We should be here to help one another not screw the poor ******* in sellin a known bad part !
My thanks to my buddy Bob for posting this. I bought the box off Ebay and reversed it myself. I swear that shaft looked ok to me, although it didn't have any splines on the input. Some are longer, and I thought it was cut off by some prior owner. Only after it broke did I see the weld. I am now looking for a company or person that can sell me another input shaft. Any ideas?
Reversed Corvair box? If so, a lot of them had a rather long input shaft. It may be that someone attempted to shorten it to a more usable length, but shortened it on the wrong end, while trying to retain the splines. You might try here; http://www.corvair.com/user-cgi/main or here; http://californiacorvairparts.com/ Roger
Wow it's sad what some people will do to make a buck. Like dave said we should be helping each other not trying to kill people in the hobby and the poor person that happens to be next to the car with scary parts. Well I'm glad you and your ride are safe. P.S. I totally dig your ride.
Honestly, I think there are a ton of guys out there that just don't understand this stuff. I had a friend who was a super mechanic and his ceiling was hanging full of some of the scariest pieces that people used for steering components that he replaced with the proper safe components. There are a lot of people that really just don't know what they are dealing with and I have seen a couple of good mechanics too that thought some things were O.K. but looked questionable to me but then I'm not a big expert either.
That weld had about 1/16" average penetration! Scary. I have welded steering components before but made sure to taper the joint so the weld went 100% thru and took pains to not quench the weld to induce fatal stress risers. You need good welding skills in addition. I run a reversed Corvair box on my '36 Willys g***er clone (little known fact; pre-war Willys came from the factory with a narrowed Olds rear end, 4-speed Hydro ******, 354 hemi, Halibrand mags and Corvair steering box) which has worked fine. I did have a similar problem with it though; GM supplied a solid split & splined coupling to attach the short box shaft to the long steering shaft. I was driving the car around town when all of a sudden the steering wheel quit talking to the steering box. I limped back home and found the splines in the coupling had stripped so the column shaft just spun independently from the box shaft. I replace it with an after-market splined U-joint. I remember back in the day my (much older) brother had a 'Vair and one time the steering wheel 'came off'. I was too young to understand what he was talking about but I bet it was the same stripped coupling that I had. Those things were just made of too-soft steel. Probably why they started making the boxes with the 3' long shaft to eliminate that weak link.
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