In Vader's excellent and helpful post about disassembling the steering wheel mess, here:

https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/faq-...eels-like.html

he refers to something called a "balance spring cap"... if you've ever disassembled the steering wheel, you know what this is. It's a thin silver metal cap that goes over a spring that could do double-duty as a suspension part. It's removed by pushing on the cap with a Philips head screwdriver, then turning it.

Unfortunately, it's so thin that it can't survive too many disassemblies (which is pretty stupid considering how much force is required to depress the spring), and this evening while reassembling the steering system, my screwdriver punched through the cap. The rip is pretty much fatal, even if I tried a larger-diameter tool, it wouldn't have anything to grip to rotate and lock it.

So I need to order one, but AutoZone doesn't list anything called the "balance spring cap"... does anybody know a part number or a different name for this thing?

Incidentally, I'm also wondering why my damned retainer pins keep falling out. The rest of the steering system is tight, but occasionally a pin will just work its way loose and fall out. (The bitch of it is that I didn't actually need to remove that spring to replace the pin that fell out, but I decided as long as I was in there I'd check the bolts.) Vader's piece mentions that when removing a pin it "will pull easily once it starts moving and deforms the stakes that were retaining it" but I see nothing that I'd consider a retaining piece.

But that's secondary, I kind of desperately need to figure out where to get one of these "balance spring cap" things.

Thanks in advance to anyone with a tip!

 

Somebody on another board asked for pix, so... The first picture is the cap itself, and in the second photo, the big blue spring is what the cap retains. You have to lean into it with quite a bit of force to compress it enough so you can turn the cap to lock it into place. (Those little tabs on the cap fit into slots in the hole where the spring is located.)

 

"It came to me in a dream."

This morning I tried to thread a large coarse-thread Philips-head screw into the hole, but of course that didn't work -- it didn't have any grip for actually turning the cap once it was depressed far enough.

After staring at it for a few minutes, I lightly hammered the small square end of a 3/8" to 1/4" socket adapter into the hole, then used a ratchet and some extensions to push it into the hole and turn it. I figured the wide flared part of the adapter where it necks-up to accept the 3/8" part would spread the load over the whole cap, and of course the square edges meant I could rotate it once it was compressed.

Maybe that info will help somebody else one day...

So it worked... this time.