steering failure

[gungehead]

Hi,
I had an interesting time yesterday, luckily in Tescos car park not on an Alpine pass. I had a steering failure. The steering wheel turned, clunked a bit, but the road wheels hardly moved.
It appears to be the top CV joint on the column has collapsed.
I thought it was getting a little heavy, especially at low speeds but there was no other indication that anything was wrong.
As far as I know everything else was ok. It is now at the mechanics being checked out.

Is this a common thing?

Dave

[Martec]

It can be, it is a two part steering column, the lower part has a hardy spicer type joint (onto the steering box) and at the top a rubber dougnut thing with bits of alloy bonded into it, this is the connection to the upper shaft.

With age and heat the rubber packs up and as happened in my case as I pulled the steering wheel up to set it, it pulled the bits of alloy out of the rubber. New ones are available but nowadays we do not know the quality of replacement parts.

I must admit I modified my column so that the column can't be driven up into my chest in a smash and the rubber dougnut is replaced with again a HS joint from an XJ6 or XJ40.

Later cars had a different bottom section and joint but I have no experience of this.

Brian

[ecosselynx]

Hi

The later cars had a CV drive which used nylon balls, sorry can't get my mind working to give a better description.

[gungehead]

Yes, mine has the cv joint. It came completely apart.
All fixed now, but apparently, the Burman box is not a good one even for Burman standards.
So I need to decide what to do, have the box rebuilt at a cost of around £600 or a rack and pinion conversion. Or live with what I have.

Dave