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MG Midget and Sprite Technical - Steering column sliding joint fix

Hi all,

Upon closer inspection of the midget I discovered that someone had drilled a hole through the inner piece of the steering column and fitted an m5 bolt and nut because the resin in the collapsible joint had erm, collapsed..

I decided to remove this bolt as it would stop the column from collapsing in the event of a serious head on crash.

Just for reference, the bolt was through the lower resin holes in the outer piece.

Here's what I did to fix it.

I removed the rouge nut and bolt.
I managed to wiggle an old feeler gauge up one of the flats between the inner shaft and the outer shaft.
It got quite tight. I would have used some shim steel but decided to sacrifice an old feeler gauge instead.
Then I got some nylon bar and turned it down in the lathe to 5.2mm, very slightly tapered due to not using a centre.
I made a hole in the feeler gauge by hammering a nail all the way through the shaft from the opposite side to force the feeler (shim) material into the outer hole.
Then I hammered in the slightly tapered nylon pin so that the thinner end forced the shim material up into the opposing hole in the outer sleeve.
This had the effect of nicely wedging itself in with the larger part nice and tight in the outer hole that has no shim material forced into it.
Its really tight.
I trimmed the sticky outy bits of nylon to around 2mm per side and tightened a jubilee clip around it, This had the extra bonus of squashing the relatively soft nylon into the holes in the outer sleeve and making the joint tighter.


Lets see how it goes.

Cheers.
Skelly.
Jon Skelly

Ingenious. But I hope you never find out if it works or not!
Greybeard

Sounds good, has to be better than a 'bolt'
specially with trimmed sticky outy bits---lol
William Revit

Think i used a plastic number plate bolt.
mark heyworth

This thread was discussed between 04/02/2020 and 05/02/2020

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