Sloppy steering wheel

cnorman31 said:

My ’91 has quite a bit of play in the steering wheel—almost enough to feel unsafe. I’m guessing the rag joint is worn. Instead of just replacing it, I’m thinking about upgrading to the MM steering shaft. Since it already has SN95 spindles, I’m also wondering if it makes sense to swap in an SN95 rack while I’m at it.

I don’t drive the car a lot, so I don’t want to spend unnecessarily, but I do want it to feel solid and safe when I do. I could use some advice—has anyone done this upgrade, and is the SN95 rack a noticeable improvement?

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I’m right in the middle of this exact upgrade moving to a SN95 rack. The only missing piece is the damn MM hybrid shaft… been waiting for months with no real EDD and honestly one of the worst customer service experiences I’ve had in a long while, and I’ve ordered a lot of stuff from MM over the past 20 years.

I don’t know what’s going on with MM right now but I have 4 separate orders for different things all placed months ago and nothing has shipped. They have given me the runaround literally dozens of times when I’ve followed up. The worst offender is the 4point kmember brace ordered on 7/1, “gone out to powder coating” on 8/1 and I still haven’t received it. Ok, rant over.

Anyways, you may be in luck buying the hybrid shaft now as it’s supposed to be in stock November 5th.

If you don’t want to spend a ton of money, you could keep everything you have now and just get a Fox solid steering shaft. But I did the whole shebang because everyone has said the SN95 rack has way better steering feel, and my system was leaky and I needed new tie rods, etc. I’ll let you know the outcome once I get the shaft and install it. Car is not driveable until then.

The torsion bar in the SN95 rack is stiffer than the Fox rack which is why it takes more effort to steer. I have SN95 racks in both my Foxes and it was one of the better things I’ve done to the cars. You will need to swap the inner tie rods to Fox inners as the SN95’s are longer and are metric threaded. Plenty of info on this swap on Stangnet.

I will say that if nothing is leaking and you are good with the feel of the steering you may want to just replace the rag joint and see what you think. Pretty cheap to do.

I eliminated the rag joint,and welded on the correct spline u-joint,worked great.