Re: tie rods frozen?

[a6561TB@gnn.com ()]

>>Any of you guys and gals out there every run into a tie rod that won't 
>>adjust?

>>Came to do the left side and the damn thing won't budge. Tried tapping on
>>the arms to see if that will free it. No dice. Heat? Lube Soak it?

>Happens all the time...... I know not the answer that you wanted to hear! 
> The fix.... Heat lot's of heat.

I had bought my 200 in 94 with outer ends shot and the tires completely bold 
on the edges, like doughnuts (lousy Turanza's-who needs them anyway). So 
I've replaced the outer ends, but did not do alignment till I've gotten 
those immaculate SP8000's. Surprise! The alignment shop had rounded off the 
adjusters and given up on them. The fun part was to find out that Audi does 
not supply adjusters in spare parts. Lovely! One has to buy the complete tie 
rod assy, of which I had the outers - new, and the inners - like new. Now 
way that I'll be paying $300 for two adjusters! Back to the drawing board, 
i.e. machine shop. I have a small Austrian made lathe/mill/drill combo in my 
lab, and it is, fortunately, metric.

The most difficuilt part was to take the old ones out. I've secured the 
inner tie rod in the wise by the adjuster itself and heated up the slotted 
part, where the cone squises it, pretty well with the acetelene torch.
Then I've put a "cheater pipe" over the ball joint part and tried to unscrew 
it. It barely gave up, with the horrible whining sound, as if it were rusted 
solid. Yep, it was. I weigh 90kg, the cheater pipe was about 1.5m, so I 
figure I've developed at least 1350Nm of torque, trying to break it loose. 

The rest was easy, it took me 20 min to make each of those adjusters. It 
only needs two runs of the cutter to make that non standard 16x1.5mm thread, 
LH on one end and RH on the other. I used the hex stock, 3/4" (19.02mm), 
stainless 304. Now it will never rust! These adjusters will probably survive 
the car itself. 

The added benefit is that now it needs a 19mm wrench, not a whimpy 15mm that 
usualy rounds up the stock one.
And I made damn sure that upon instalation the threads received lots of 
graphite anti-seize.




Igor Kessel
'89 200TQ, chipped and MOMO'd through out,
in Tornado "arrest-me-officer" Red;
'88 Fox, "the FOX machine";
ex '85 5000s, "the EE's nightmare"
Phila PA, USA
a6561TB@gnn.com