If you have a death wish, and want to kill innocent people (including possibly your friends and family - most likely BTW!), then, by all means, buy the POS death trap Flaming River shaft.
Argg, my website host had ANOTHER "major" failure. I'm getting sick and tired of topclasshost.com! So, at least for a while, no pictures in the message below.
FYI:
I wish that other people came forward before and said what a HUGE POS the flaming river steering shaft is. Since my post, I've heard from people that have had the set bolt and nuts come loose and also knew/suspected that it was a bad design.
Well, unlike the idiots that designed that shaft, I do Mechanical Engineering professional. I'm mainly a Computer Engineer. But I have my 3 years of ME schooling (my minor), and I often do Mechanical Engineering stuff. I brought the shaft to work and showed the Principal MEs the design. They either broke out in laughter, or had a near heart attack knowing that people are driving with those things on the same street they they and their families drive on. I didn't know about the MM shaft back then. If I did, I would have never gotten the Flaming river shaft.
If you showed just the two following images to any Mechanical Engineering student and they couldn't immediately see many problems with the design, then I think that any University would be fully justified flunking them out of school! And, I say that as a former engineering teacher! BTW, ignore the length of the bar stock. It's the depth of the screws and the flat locking nuts "locking against" the round body. Plus, the moronic very shallow depth that flaming river suggests for a counter sink. For one thing, WHY so shallow? Geez, do they know anything at that company?
Close up of the Flaming River rod and joint assembled:
Another close up of the Flaming River rod and joint assembled:
Flaming River shaft instructions:
My solution to the POS Flaming River design. Compare the counter sink amount to the pictures above. Also, the JB Weld I used was has a very high temp rating (the shaft is next to the headers).
Here is how much I did the counter-sink for the screws. You can see the difference in height in the set-screws fro the side and the flat.
The JB-Weld job isn't pretty, but MY steering assembly is never coming apart!
Update: I'm switching web hosts. I'm sick of the POS and half-*ssed setup that topclasshost.com has. I don't know when or if those pictures will be back up. I'll try my best.
The main site tech info, with the diagrams, should be up in a few days.
What can I say? Topclasshost.com SUCKS *SS!!
What a POS setup and company! For the ?4th? time, they've had a "major failure". That is, CHEAP *SS HOSTING and people that don't have a ****ING CLUE about disk drives!!!!!
Topclasshost.com lost ALL of the data in their raid5 setup for that server. Why? A number of reasons. The main one is that they are CLUELESS, and/or don't give a rat's *ss, about data reliability.
Note: I started doing disk interfaces, and picking drives and companies for the #3/#2 computer company when I started Engineering after school. What a great job for a Computer/Elec/Mech Engineer! Thanks to me (and the engineers at the startup that did a mega kick *ss job , a disk startup was very successful (I chose them over the other companies because I needed the disk performance). I still keep up on the disk industry. BTW: anyone that hasn't read, and understood, the Google disk report does not know **** about disk drives and their reliability today!