Eldavo said:
I recall you making a modified steering shaft Jon, are these still available?
We can re-manufacture an old one with new bearings with a higher temperature rating than the originals.
The problem is that Porsche designed the car firsty as a left hand drive car, where the steering shaft is away from the exhaust, but on the right hand drive car, they used the same bearings but the shaft comes very close to one of the hottest points in the exhaust, so the seals shrink with age (5 years typically) which is accelerated by the high temperature and then the heat from the exhaust melts the grease in the bearings which then run out of the bearings.
A new genuine one will typically start to have play soon after 5 years (when the seal shrinks partly through age, but partly through heat) and once the grease melts away and out of the bearing, the bearing runs dry, as the seal shrinks more road grit and dust gets in and acts as an abrasive.
So when we have a used shaft re-manufactured, the new bearing has a higher temperature seal and higher temperature grease.
We fit these all the time in the workshop, where we know we get the old one to re-manufacture for someone else, but for mail order it is difficult to get originals back, so we don't really advertise them that much.
We had the same problem with our original PrecisionShifts, where we used to reuse one small cast iron item but with new stainless steel moving surfaces as one tiny re-used part of the assembly, but it was always a problem to get old ones back, which then meant we never had ones in stock, so now we make that part from scratch from stainless steel, but it increased the cost of the entire assembly by quite a margin.
We even tried charging a surcharge, but price the surcharge too low and you don't get the old ones back to re-manufacture, and price them too high and people do not buy the product... But manufacturing the entire steering shaft from scratch is very expensive unless we had several hundred made at a time.
For my car I have had to buy a new one from Porsche and remanufacture that, and we have had to do that quite a few times for customers on mail order.
Our ones should last a lot longer, but I would also advise customers to make sure all the heat shields are in place on their car, both between the engine and manifold, but also around the steering shaft on the cross member (these are often also missing and aggravate the problem!)
I guess that is a long winded way of saying we can do them, but I would ask you to send the old one back and pay a surcharge on it which would be refunded when we get your old one back.
