At the end of April, I collected the rebuilt steering box from Holman Engineering in Surrey, a family owned small business nestled between houses on a residential road. The rebuild kit I bought in January for a Mk1 Cortina unfortunately wasn’t quite right, the ball bearing races were too small, but I assumed the rest of the kit that included the gaskets and sector shaft bush were all ok. Jeff (Holman Engineering) sourced the correct size ball bearings with bearing races and the rest of the build was apparently straight forward.
It only took a couple hours of an afternoon over the Bank Holiday weekend to re-install, though it was a bit heavy and awkward to get the steering shaft up into the interior without the column bracketry catching on nearly every edge and surface. I made the mistake of tightening the bolts to the body/chassis too soon that it left me no wiggle room to attach the bolts to the pedal supports and dashboard. A bit of back tracking loosening bolts, I could wiggle the steering shaft into place and get the other securing bolts under the dash lined up and fitted. I just had to reconnect the steering drop arm and drag link, refit the steering column bits and the job was done.
I had to wait before I could take the car out for a test drive as I needed to get some SAE 80EP (AGL-4) oil for the steering box, but my local motor factor couldn’t source the specific grade I needed. In the end I used Amazon to buy 2 litres so I can use it on the gear box later, as well. A week later when the weather had improved (or had stayed dry long enough) I took the car for a test drive and to serve as a trip to get some more fuel. It felt so much more positive and responsive to my input and was very smooth to turn and drive. Coupled with the new shock absorbers all round the Corsair is much nicer to drive, just a minor misfire to check which could be a failed spark plug as before.
I also took the opportunity to fit a replacement steering column shroud I had bought a while ago, as I had cracked and glued back together my original shroud a few years ago. However, I was missing two bolts, so I had a rummage in my spare bolt jars and found some metric bolts that would fit if cut down and re-cut with a new thread. It was was one of those things that bugged me for a while and now I have 4 bolts to secure the two halves of the steering column shroud.