(ET) Steering gear tightness

I stumbled upon something that I haven't heard mentioned on the list before. I had been trying to tighten up my sloppy steering gear meshing on my stripped down E-20 tractor. Followed all the recomedations on the list, including grinding down the base of steering shaft pinion gear holder. Placing extra shims on fan gear shaft, etc. Non of these were giving me much satisfaction when turning the wheel with the potential for slop still being there. I was doing all this with the front side covers off of the tractor as I am in the process of rebuilding it after a frame weld job. I took this opportuinity to replace the rivots that hold the side panels on with rivot/nuts. Rivot/nuts are very interesting in that they require you to drill out the original rivots from the tractor and then replace them with the 2 piece rivot/nut assembly. Basically you use a special tool which compresses the rivot/nut assembly in the new drilled out hole. This allows you to use regular screw type bolts to attach panels to the tractor. It makes it easy to remove components like the side panels and fenders, etc and then simply screw them back on. Anyway, in the process of putting the panels back on I noticed that you really had to pull the front of the tractor into the main upright housing of tractor to get the rivot/nut holes to align properly. This pulling together of the steering housing and the front of the tractor has tightened up the gears so much that I ended up removing the shim from the fan gear assembly.

I would guess that some of you have front panels that the rivots have deteriated to the point that they are no longer pulling the front and middle of tractor tightly together. I obtained my rivot/nut kit from J.C. Whitney catalog and it has been a great tool for working on these great tractors.

Bob Kleinbrahm

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