Cage depends on materials made from and whose logbook you'd be looking to get..so more info needed.

found a place up the road that does custom steering racks and rebuilds.

http://www.mavalgear.com/unisteer.html

That cheap escort rack merits some investigation though. bunch of them for a buck fifty or so on fleabay + shipping from UK. most of the quick ones are RHD tho


In other news, the sr20 est arrive! the l20 has issues. Yep, ditching the L-power and going with the modern power plant. Let's hope this jdm pile of bolts runs. Paging Mr. Coleman... do you have a schematic for your spaghetti?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/15/2010 12:28PM by dirty_d.

If you're not dead set on power steering (don't know if the escort rack is powered), and are going as far as custom fitting a rack from a different car...

Quaife makes a quick rack for the 88-91 civic that's about 2.3 turns lock to lock (all the literature says 2.8, but I have it in my car, and it's closer to 2.3 than 2.8).

Costs $200-250 for the rack and pinion, plus the civic manual rack housing (available in any junkyard, anywhere).

Don't know how far the rack travels in those 2.3 turns. Civic steers the back end of the knuckle.

If you're picking and poking boneyards for rear steer racks, find a '01-up ish Caddy STS. Rear steer rack, a little over 2 turns, and 5.5" of travel.

'05-ish Devilles had 2.6 turn racks. So did 3.4l-era Grand Am GTs, in a narrower housing.

here is a rhd 240z rack flipped and mounted on a custom crossmember for a turbo sr20 on a 510. this car is lowered, and was run at targa newfoundland some years ago (it was a crazy green color with a scooby hood scoop and top mount intercooler) On the forum he reported merely ok steering due to extreme angles of steering linkage, but with big fat tires and lotsa caster on tarmac i'm sure he was fighting hard to turn that sucker.

Seems like the old Pintos had a pretty stout flexable "shaft" made out of a cable like material. Don't know if it is still available but might make the steering rack mounting easier on some installs.

I put a power Ford rack in a v-8 Volvo 140 years ago. Front mounted and fit right in. Can't remember what it was out of, likely Mustang or Fairmont. The local alignment shop wouldn't touch it because it wasn't stock...idiots. So we just set the toe with string and called it fixed. Car drove just fine.

Even better, we built a 1950 Ford Woody with a 302/C4 for a customer. The oil pan and the steering collided something fierce. All the old car guys said get a Saginaw box out of a Vega. I did. Cut and plated the frame mounted the box, rear steer, and funny thing....we were pushing it in the shop and they guy steering turned the wheel left and proceeded to run over my foot on the right side of the car. Pretty frickin funny after I quit cussing. Backwards steering. Seems like none of the 'experts' had actually mounted one in a 50's Ford they just thought it should work. Pre-internet days.

The cure was...oddly enough...a Datsun 510 steering box and tie rods. Fit right in, turned the right direction and was just collecting dust in the corner.

Quote
Aaron Luptak
If you're not dead set on power steering (don't know if the escort rack is powered), and are going as far as custom fitting a rack from a different car...

Quaife makes a quick rack for the 88-91 civic that's about 2.3 turns lock to lock (all the literature says 2.8, but I have it in my car, and it's closer to 2.3 than 2.8).

Costs $200-250 for the rack and pinion, plus the civic manual rack housing (available in any junkyard, anywhere).

Don't know how far the rack travels in those 2.3 turns. Civic steers the back end of the knuckle.

I'm pretty sure you could get the whole S13 front subframe/suspension/stering assembly for less than that. Making the subframe, with proper steering geometry already designed in by smarter people than us, is much easier than making a steering rack fit a 510 subframe.

Don't even think of the 240Z steering rack idea. Is a 40-year-old steering rack really an upgrade worthy of all that effort?

-Dave

Quote
dirty_d
In other news, the sr20 est arrive! the l20 has issues. Yep, ditching the L-power and going with the modern power plant. Let's hope this jdm pile of bolts runs. Paging Mr. Coleman... do you have a schematic for your spaghetti?

Don't need a schematic, Nissan already made one.

You can start with a KA24DE engine harness from an S13 (or maybe it was the earlier KA24E harness... I'm checking) and a Sentra SE-R ECU. The harness will be way too long for a 510, and will have lots of crap in it you don't care about. There's a handy single-page pinout diagram in Nissan's service manuals that will tell you what each pin goes to in the ECU. Go through it and identify what you want and what you don't. You can eliminate maybe 1/4 of the wires. I ditched the various idle control circuits, for example, and just adjust idle with bypass screw. Sure, it idles high, but that's one less system I have to worry about. I recommend keeping the Nissan diagnostic port (Pre OBDII and Nissan-unique, but still handy for the various gauges and ECU reading tools you can get for '90s Nissan engines)

Next, decide where you'll put your ECU.

Here's mine (far right on the tray next to the fuse box)


Then, make a rope harness, as described here:

http://www.motoiq.com/magazine_articles/articletype/articleview/articleid/1694/project-miatabusa-part-42--wiring-the-engine.aspx

Then you can unwrap, rearrange, trim, and re-wrap the stock harness.

-Dave

Quote
eyesoreracing
I'm pretty sure you could get the whole S13 front subframe/suspension/stering assembly for less than that. Making the subframe, with proper steering geometry already designed in by smarter people than us, is much easier than making a steering rack fit a 510 subframe.-Dave

Quoted for truth. This was by far the easiest way to go when I did my RX-7.

My options were:


Fuck around with either poorly installing a rack
Fuck around with a shitty control arm setup
Fuck around with goofball one-piece struts that bend spindles and bend tubes and thus are hard-to-find wear items

- OR -

Slam the modern subframe up against the shell, drill and/or adapt brackets as needed - once.
Cut/section a steering shaft to mate the column to the rack. (Room for a quickener underhood!)
Redrill/extend brackets for the motor mounts (easier with modern engine I was using anyway, HINT)
Enjoy the ability to actually buy struts off the shelf
Enjoy control arms, spindles, etc that are much beefier
Enjoy brakes bigger than a CD

It's not a question of if I'd do it again, it's a question of why didn't I do it sooner and why would I NOT do it again.

If Nissan is like other companies - and I bet they are - step 1 is probably trivial because once a company seems to set itself on certain hard dimensions, they stick with them come hell or high water. Body rail width is one of them.

Wait a minute there Dave...you forgot to tell them about the head to head Datsun 510 vs Volvo 242 test we did this weekend

No I didn't: http://www.rallyanarchy.com/phorum/read.php?5,42729

Quote
Pete
Quoted for truth. This was by far the easiest way to go when I did my RX-7.

My options were:

Fuck around with either poorly installing a rack
Fuck around with a shitty control arm setup
Fuck around with goofball one-piece struts that bend spindles and bend tubes and thus are hard-to-find wear items

- OR -

Slam the modern subframe up against the shell, drill and/or adapt brackets as needed - once.
Cut/section a steering shaft to mate the column to the rack. (Room for a quickener underhood!)
Redrill/extend brackets for the motor mounts (easier with modern engine I was using anyway, HINT)
Enjoy the ability to actually buy struts off the shelf
Enjoy control arms, spindles, etc that are much beefier
Enjoy brakes bigger than a CD

It's not a question of if I'd do it again, it's a question of why didn't I do it sooner and why would I NOT do it again.

If Nissan is like other companies - and I bet they are - step 1 is probably trivial because once a company seems to set itself on certain hard dimensions, they stick with them come hell or high water. Body rail width is one of them.

I think this will be slightly less easy than the RX-7, as the frame rails have moved out in the 20 year gap between the PL510 and S13. Still, the effort is comparable to what it takes to make an SR fit in a 510 in the first place.

L motors are rear sump. SR20 is front sump, so you'll have to modify the stock subframe to install the engine. The rear of the oil pan also bolts to the bellhousing right where the limp-dick center steering link swings, so you either have to modify the pan (as i did), or bend the link and make it even flexier than it was before.

Then, you have to fabricate or purchase (as I did) engine mounts.

In theory, you should be able to bolt the SR20 to the S13 subframe it was designed for, stick it in the car, and put that fabricating effort to work on making the subframe fit. In reality, I think the engine's relationship to the front wheel centerline is not the same on the S13 and 510, so you may still have to tweak the mounts a bit. The effort will be well worth it, though.

-Dave

Quote
eyesoreracing
In theory, you should be able to bolt the SR20 to the S13 subframe it was designed for, stick it in the car, and put that fabricating effort to work on making the subframe fit. In reality, I think the engine's relationship to the front wheel centerline is not the same on the S13 and 510, so you may still have to tweak the mounts a bit. The effort will be well worth it, though.

-Dave

So move the front centerline forward. A little more wheelbase, a lot more caster, what's the problem? Tin snips and sledgehammers fix the tire clearance problems.

'Tis what I did. I didn't do it for engine location, though, I did it because it made it a little easier to do the crossmember swap since shifting the wheels forward an inch let me use two of the original mounting studs, at the expense of having to make new motor mounts... all the time I was doing it, I kept wondering if it was really worth all the bother compared to just leaving the wheel centerline where it was. Then I drove it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/18/2010 08:14PM by Pete.

If that's the direction things need to go, then yea, that's basically a good plan. I just can't remember if that's the direction things need to go...

-Dave

Quote
eyesoreracing

Quote
Aaron Luptak
If you're not dead set on power steering (don't know if the escort rack is powered), and are going as far as custom fitting a rack from a different car...

Quaife makes a quick rack for the 88-91 civic that's about 2.3 turns lock to lock (all the literature says 2.8, but I have it in my car, and it's closer to 2.3 than 2.8).

Costs $200-250 for the rack and pinion, plus the civic manual rack housing (available in any junkyard, anywhere).

Don't know how far the rack travels in those 2.3 turns. Civic steers the back end of the knuckle.

I'm pretty sure you could get the whole S13 front subframe/suspension/stering assembly for less than that. Making the subframe, with proper steering geometry already designed in by smarter people than us, is much easier than making a steering rack fit a 510 subframe.

Don't even think of the 240Z steering rack idea. Is a 40-year-old steering rack really an upgrade worthy of all that effort?

-Dave

Don't be a silly-willy, Davey!
A REBUILT, as good as factory fresh 240 rack for 150 MIGHT be worthwhile, or an Escort MkII LHD rack even better.