HOW TO FIX STEERING SLOP/ Intermediate shaft removal
 

So long story short I fully depowered my 93 rack ( the car I crashed) and then swapped it into my 96. I didn’t option to weld the rotary valve but we will get to that later. Anyways when removing the rack from my 96 (the new car) it was late at night and I forgot to take the lower swivel joint bolt all the way out. Releasing my inner hulk I stepped on the subframe and pulled on the rack until something gave... which turned out to be my intermediate steering shaft. After putting the depowered rack in, and reinstalling the intermediate shaft I slapped together a diy alignment and took it for a test drive. Despite loving the depowered road feel I felt a lot of slop in center. After lots of researching I have figured out where this play was coming from and decided to make this thread to help others. Basically if your intermediate shaft ends up falling out upon reinstalling you must put the white plastic fingernails on the two flat spots on the upper shaft.

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Mine didn’t come out with the shaft and as such upon reinstalling I must have just jammed them up top. It’s a pain in the butt do redo all my work from yesterday, but the amount of slop/play was intolerable. I hope this helps others facing this issue.

Nic

I'm dealing with this issue right now, and I guess the previous owner either lost the plastic shims or jammed them super far up in the intermediate shaft. Did you make those shims yourself or did you find the original ones you had?

Had similar issue - pulled until it popped out, lost one of the two shims. I searched all over the internet for a replacement, and was unable to find one. Eventually I stumbled upon the shim in my garage, everything is snug with both shims installed.

Still curious where one is to find these if they're lost...

If I can't find one, I'm considering JB welding the intermediate shaft on the outside where they connect. In the case of failure, I just return to the original steering wheel slop I have now, and I can still remove the steering rack from the lower U-Joint. I can't really see that many downsides, as having a depowered rack should theoretically take most of the maintenance out of the equation and I don't see myself trying to do custom steering rack placement or anything.

They're not available separately from Mazda, you can only buy the complete intermediate shaft for ~$200, PN# NA02-32-090C

Correct, when the shafts are manufactured the white plastic is injected through the two small holes in the outer shaft to provide a 0-chance at any slop, they’re literally molded in place.

That makes sense. Do you think silicone would be enough for taking up the slop or is that not dense enough

Nah it needs to be something pretty solid. Replacement shafts are usually pretty easy and cheap to find used, probably best to just replace with one that’s not been pulled apart

I figured the silicone interface would be really thin in those splines so the squish would be negligible so I used a gray RTV (high torque and temp) to replace the missing shims. I can report it now feels great and I'd recommend anyone who has lost these shims to do something similar. I dropped the rack down about 2 inches so the top of the splines were still holding the correct alignment, squished the RTV in the two flat spots (of course it got everywhere) and slid it back together. I'm sure I won't like taking it apart but I plan not to.

Damn, I probably should have tried that. I just replaced the whole intermediate shaft since I was doing a dash swap so it was easy to do "while I'm in there"

Damn thanks for this.