Cutting down the steering rack

Here are some pictures of cutting 5.5" off the Miata steering rack and welding the parts back together. This is not the preferred way to to shorten a rack, but it is the cheapest. The quality of the welding is vital to say the least!

These are the shortened pieces:

These are the parts that were removed- I used a cheap compound miter saw with a 10" abrasive blade:

Here is the assembled rack. Part alignment was handled by strapping the parts to angle iron while welding and the end result was pretty good. Everything is straight!

Cleaning up donor parts...

It's been a busy winter complete with a change of employers which will be promising for making more progress with the locost: my work days are shorter which frees up over an hour extra each evening!

I will be buying the steel tubing and build table supplies as soon as one of the tax returns comes in. I'm biding my time until then cleaning up some of the parts and pieces that will be reused, so they look and function better. My donor was a winter-driven car, so many of the parts are currently covered in rust. This weekend was spent taking the steering rack apart roughly half way and welding the line fitting shut so they function as plugs: it will be converted to manual and shortened.

I also took the brake calipers apart, degreased them, stripped the paint and rust off of them (chemically and with a wire brush on a drill), and repainted them. While reassembling them I'm polishing and greasing the slide pins and making sure the brake hardware is correctly functioning. Having recently built a very nice basement workbench for my boys also provides me a wonderful place to do such work.