First off, I visited the steering column refurbishment. As I've mentioned several times in the past, I have pretty much two of everything because of the black car (except motor and gearbox). I've been working on getting the steering column restored and doing both in parallel, picking the better parts to use to make one good one and one "shelf" one.
The steering column, or shaft, itself is a two-piece design for impact safety. It's supposed to collapse upon impact. Triumph used a shaft inside a tube with a break-away clamp that allows it to slide inside itself so you don't catch the steering wheel in your chest in a head-on collision.
The black car's steering column is not in the best shape at either end, with both knurled portions a bit beat up. Dorothy's, however, are in great shape. The catch is that the black car's steering column is in its proper two pieces and, for the life of me, I cannot separate Dorothy's. This is something I'll continue to work on, but right now they may as well be welded together.
The next thing I worked on was getting the steering bushings out of the steering column cowl. The bushings keep the steering column centered and not wobbly. I bought a new bushing kit from TRF and wanted to get them replaced, eventually destructively removing the old bushings.
With those removed, I moved on to cleaning up the steering column cowl using the stripping disk and the blasting cabinet for the more difficult to reach areas. I was happy with how it came out.
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| The steering wheel end of the cleaned up cowl. |
Moving on to the internals, I worked on cleaning up the horn slip ring that goes behind the steering wheel. Unfortunately, I ended up breaking one of them, but was able to successfully clean up the other. Whoops.
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| The (unclean) horn slip ring. |
I did a bunch more stuff in the blasting cabinet as well, all waiting for either epoxy primer or Rustoleum.
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| So many little things to do. |
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| Steering column cowl all painted nice and pretty. |
The rest of the visit was all about getting epoxy primer on a bunch of random parts and the back of the tub (B-post on back).
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| Getting ready. |
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| The little things. Accelerator linkage, radius arm brackets, crash pad rails, and rear bumper brackets. |
I tried to show you in the video how I tested the spray gun, but I need to come up with better protection for my video camera that also doesn't cloud the image.
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| All in nice, shiny epoxy primer! |
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| The back, after the second coat. |
With a fresh coat of epoxy on all of that stuff, my 7-day window clock was running for the next step for some of those areas...Raptor Liner!
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