I have read some people had lengthened their steering shaft after doing a body lift, and some did not. I did a 3" body lift using 2x3 tubing and I didnt extend mine. Ive been offroad with it and on road and have had no problem.  Im wanting to know who here has or doesnt have the steering shaft extended?

Thanks,
Bill

I HAD A PIECE WELDED IN MINE TO EXTEND IT THE 2 AND A WHATEVER INCHES THAT CALMINI SUGGESTED MATTY D...

I had to extend mine.  I used a old socket

lata stu

I got my info from Dave Ulrich at this site.

http://home.golden.net/~haida/suzuki/tech/tips/lift.html

I had emailed him and he didnt extend his. I was just wondering why some had to and others didnt.What kind of problems should I look for?

Later,
Bill

We have a 3 inch body lift, and we haven't extended ours. I am not sure why some have to be, and some don't. Ours drives and steers fine too.

Heather

At the beginning i made an 3" body-lift and don't extend the steering shaft.

One day when i roll on the road a loose the steering  

After than a extend that for correct lengh and safety!

Fredo

power steering models in the uk have a sliding joint on the steering column
this allows for the extra height when fitting the body lift ( if its not siezed up ... which it usually is ... in this case a liberal dose of heat and pulling frees them off .. then clean up and oil )
otherwise a spacer needs to be fitted in the linkage to give the extra length

If you don´t extend the shaft, either thru freeing up the slip joint or with a spacer, you end up forcing the rag joint.......

If you have a corrugated tube, you need the extesion for the body lift.  If its a slip style shaft, you shoudnt need it.

Could someone be so kind enough to post here  a picture of what a slip joint / sliding or slip shaft looks like so I could compare it with mine?  I recently did a 2-inch body lift too.  I'll try to post  a pic of my steering shaft too.

There's a third style of shaft that's somewhat uncommon on some of the early tracks/kicks.  I'm not sure if it's only the power steering equipped models that have it, but my tracker is an LSi with PS and I haven't got anything else to compare it to save for the fact that it doesn't fit the description of the normal slip or rag joint ones.

It's somewhat like a telescopic/slip joint style but it doesn't slip and has plastic pins through it that presumably allow it to collapse in an accident.  It uses real U-joints on the ends.  I tried drilling through the plastic pins to make it slip but it wouldn't even after doing that and yanking on it with my handy dandy Harbor Freight 13lb slide hammer.  Ultimately I had to cut it in half with a sawzall.  

I took a piece of 4130 Chromoly steel tubing that had an inside diameter that was just slightly smaller than the middle of the three sections of the shaft.  I then filed the middle part of the shaft down just enough to get it to slip fit into the tubing.  I don't have the exact size of the tubing but I think it was around .83" inside diameter with .120 wall thickness.  Easy to find from metal suppliers or online from places like Aircraft Spruce.  Figured the 4130 would be at least as strong as the old shaft was.  Anyway after filing the middle section down, I put the separate ends back on to test fit and measure the length needed for the tubing.  After I had the tubing cut to length and deburred it, I just drilled it through both the 4130 tubing and the old shaft where the plastic stuff was.  I matched the hole size to some of the socket headed shoulder style bolts and used them with locknuts since they're better for a shear type load like the steering shaft is.  Just use washers to get things lined up since you probably won't be able to find bolts that have a shoulder the exact length you need otherwise.  

That's pretty much it.  Just check em periodically and make sure you use some sort of locknut or other equivalent like a cotter pin or safety wire because this isn't something you want coming loose unexpectedly.  You might even want to use two shoulder bolts on each end for the sake of redundancy.  Realistically anything that's metric grade 10.9 or better or grade 8 SAE is probably fine, heck grade 5 SAE is probably sufficient since it's not so much a heavy load as much as being a safety issue.  

I have the same style as this one, I just
cut mine and put a peice of steel tubing
from my port-o-power in it, welded it up
good and off I go. The bolts that go thru
are what keeps the shaft from turning on
the steering box input shaft, as long as
the bolts stay in the hole, even loose you
will have steering, how do I know?  

well I don't want to say
Darrin

Here is a pic of the steering shaft added peice,
look right of the header tube and you can see it,
the turbo outlet is pointing at it, I didn't even
bother to paint it, I was in too much of a hurry,
besides paint just gets dirty and looks bad
http://wildcatent.freeyellow.com/zookmods/all-together.jpg

My shaft comes out of the firewall with about 2" of steel shaft showing then it has a rubber boot all the way down to the steering box. Ill have to go check a stock Tracker to see if anything looks out of wack.

Bill

power steering models in the uk have a sliding joint on the steering column

Well mine hasn't but fortunately I didn't need to extend it anyway