CATEGORIES FOR ARTICLE LINKS BELOW

Mounting the Steering Rack to the Acura RL Subframe

So the sub frame is in and I feel really good about it.  It is low to the ground, but I wanted to have the hood close, and bringing the entire center of mass lower can’t be a bad thing.  It’s a lot of weight now hanging out in front of the tires and having it low in the frame is going to be a plus.  Add to that all the items that are now even further out in front like the radiator, ac condenser, and eventually an intercooler and one can see its going to be a lot of weight up there.  Hopefully the car will balance out nicely with the addition of the AWD sub frame and rear differential out back.

Moving on to the steering rack.  I didn’t want to try and use the civic rack and modify all the mounting points on the Rl sub frame.  While it would have been nice to save the weight and use the manual steering rack, there is that part of me that always go back and forth about keeping the power steering.  If you have ever driven a car on a racetrack without power steering you know that your arms start to feel it after a 20-minute track session.  After a 30-minute track session you really start to feel it.  By the end of the day of running 3-4 of these sessions you’re hammered.  Often I wonder if my times would improve if my arms just weren’t so hammered.  Also remember that I really enjoy streetcars that can be driven on the track and not vice-versa.  So for now I used the much heavier RL steering rack, but that saved me some time trying to fabricate mounts and locating the rack to minimize bump steer.  

At this point I thought for sure I would have to modify the firewall to line up with the steering output, but get this…..it lined right up.  Then I thought for sure I would have to modify the steering shaft since the RL steering shaft is a different size and spline count, but it turns out that the steering shaft coming out of both the civic steering rack and the RL rack are the same, its only the steering shaft itself going to the steering wheel that is different.  So by taking the universal joint from the civic it bolted right onto the steering rack of the RL and bolted right to the steering shaft of the civic.  Then I thought, well the length isn’t’ going to be right and I will have to extend or shorten the shaft.  Nope, the length was only minutely different and I was able to make that adjustment in the universal enough to not matter.  Can you believe that!!!!  Oh the swap gods have hooked me up on that part of this build.  So now some pictures right?