Last Tuesday, my 1987 Corolla SR5 finally had the accident I was fearing would eventually come to it. With all the traveling I've been doing for work between Philadelphia and places like Pottstown and Reading, it seemed bound to happen eventually. It put a knife in my heart, but it turned out the damage wasn't too bad: one fender trashed, side marker lamp broken, and one steering tie rod broken, all on the left side. The frame is appears 99% unscathed. I now suspect that the tie rod had already been slightly bent and weakened by a very bad pot hole I hit at about 45 MPH on City Avenue in Philly a month or two ago. Anyway, on Tuesday, the tie rod buckled forward and broke, and I had to have the car towed home, as it was unsteerable.
I bought a new outer tie rod from the dealer ($90), and today I removed the remnant of the old one from the inner tie rod (after three doses of penetrating oil), only to discover that the inner tie rod (the ball and threaded rod that attach directly to the rack) is also bent at the stem where the rod meets the ball. A small notch in the stem made by the ball's collar shows how it got that way. I know never to try to fix steering and suspension parts when bent, so I ordered that part from the dealer today (another $75). But now I have another problem: I'm having trouble disassembling the ball joint on the end of the rack, so that I can remove the old part and be ready to install the new one when it comes. I've bent back the locking washer which wraps over the flats on the sleeve surrounding the ball, and I've tried to turn the sleeve by those flats, against a back-up wrench on the flats at the end of the rack, adjacent to the sleeve. Being careful not to twist the rack itself, I repeatedly used my maximum hand force between the two wrenches with about 10 inches of leverage, but the sleeve still wouldn't move. This assembly was inside the intact rubber boot and looks clean (well greased and no rust), so I'm surprised I'm getting so much resistance. Am I correct in expecting the sleeve to unscrew counterclockwise? Could it have reverse (left hand) threads? (I can't see any purpose for that.) My main question is, am I on the right track, or is this not supposed to turn the way I'm trying to turn it? I do NOT want to just blindly brute force it and wreck the steering rack! However, if more torque is what is needed, I will arrange to get more leverage. If not, how does it come apart?
More on what I've done: I put penetrating oil on the sleeve a couple of times, so far to no avail; there's more soaking in tonight. The collar appears to take a 30 mm open-end wrench, which I don't have, so I was using channel-lock pliers on it. After that failed to yield results, I went shopping for a 30 mm wrench at Sears, but the flats on the sleeve are only about 7 mm wide, and the only 30 mm wrench I found at Sears had jaws about 10 mm wide (thick), so it wouldn't fit. I was also looking for a longer 20 mm fixed wrench to use as the back-up wrench on the rack (what I used today was an adjustable wrench which was not ideal), but the flats there are only about 7 mm wide also, vs. 9 mm on the wrench I found in the store. I could buy the wrenches and grind them down, but they run $12 each, which is a lot for tools you're going to modify to do one job only. I was thinking of buying a piece of 2 inch wide by 1/4 inch thick steel stock, cutting two lengths of it, and cutting a notch out of each to make 30 mm and 20 mm wrenches with long handles. (They only have to work twice.) I have the car up on jack stands in the back yard, and the part--the inner tie rod--is expected by Friday, so by then I'd like to have this assembly apart and the bent old part removed.
While we're at it, I noticed that the grease on the rack teeth looks like regular gray lithium grease, the same as used for suspension ball joints and general chassis lubrication, but the steering ball joint on the end of the rack (that I'm trying to disassemble) has an orange-brown colored grease in it. Is that difference important, or when I get the joint apart, can I use gray lithium grease to install the new part?
Thanks a lot to everyone for any help you can provide. By the way, I know I'll need a shop to do a front end alignment when this repair is done.
Stephen