Does your steering wheel "clunk" when off road? The zip tie fix will make your day!!!!!!

Ha, you are a better man than me!

 

Same here. It made it worse. Although my green plastic shim piece was still in tact. Maybe this only works if the shim has worn. Think a shot of very heavy grease is a better solution.

 

Just did this last night. Thanks for all the good info, but it did not fix the clunk for me have an appointment at Toyota in a few days to see if it’s a bigger issue

 

Bump! I did a write up for a zip tie mod killer! Let me know if it helps anyone!!!

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads...-fix-zip-tie-mod-killer.702754/#post-24912139

 

Thank you. This fix appears to have worked on my 2006 Toyota Tacoma.

 

Dumb question maybe, but what's the "right" way to fix this, and why don't people do that? Expense, install pain?

 

The cheapest way to fix this is to add zip ties. I used this method for a while, but it wears out over a small period of time. I ended up replacing my intermediate steering shaft ($205 through a Toyota OEM on Ebay) and my lower intermediate steering shaft as well. After replacing these, the slop was mostly fixed. I still had some slop and a clunk in the steering wheel. My steering wheel still got the clunk in it when hitting rough bumps. My main two issues were:

1. a lower passenger ball joint that didn't have any play in it until 30k miles after I had the clank.
2. the lower intermediate steering shaft and the intermediate steering shaft being too far apart in the slip joint.

After replacing the lower control arm my front end clank went away. My steering wheel clunk remained. I loosened up the slip joint on my steering shafts and forced them much closer together so there was almost no up/down movement in my steering shafts and that fixed my steering wheel clunk. It is silent now going over very rough bumps and can honestly say my steering on my 2.25" lifted Tacoma on 32's is tighter than my buddies stock rig with less than 100k miles.

I went through 2 lower intermediate steering shafts because I bought remanufactured parts that were about $50/ea. They wore out pretty quickly and I had sloppy steering again within 5-10k miles. I bought an OEM for ~$180 and it made a huge difference. The OEM part was a major improvement. Making sure the shafts were as close together as possible in the slip joint was very important that I did not take into account. After fixing the slip joint shaft spacing, I can now go over washboard or very rough road transitions and it has no clunks or clanks at all.

I was fighting sloppy steering for easily 60k miles. I replaced literally every bushing in the front end that I could do without major reconstruction. Sway bar bushings, UCAs, sway bar end links, sway bar relocation kit, suspension top hats, shocks, coils, tightening body mount bushings, radiaator bushings, inner and outer tie rods, and finally LCAs. I replaced my rack and pinion bushings with polyurethane bushings which didn't solve the problem. I eventually replaced the entire rack and pinion all-together and still did not fix my steering slop, even after adjusting the backlash 3 or 4 times. in the end it was just my lower intermediate and intermediate steering shafts that returned me to stock steering tightness.

 

How hard is the replacement job on those parts?

 

I have replaced my lower intermediate steering shaft in under 30 minutes. The intermediate steering shaft took me about 2 hours? It's not necessary to get an alignment after as long as you have the splines matched up. It's pretty easy to match them up. You might have to make 2 or 3 adjustments to get it right. I would do it 10x over to get the results that I did. Absolutely worth it. I highly recommend. If you have a ton of rust, I would expect 2-5x the amount of time. Spray with PB blaster a day ahead of delivery date on the parts. You should definitely do it.

 

You don't happen have part numbers do you? As usual, the dealer parts sites are highly confusing.

 

I got you.
45203-04021 and 45220-04010

You're welcome.

 

Was checking out this install video (doesn't look bad at all) and they suggest 45220-04020 in the comments. It's available but I'm having trouble confirming this is the newer version of 45220-04010 as they suggest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dr7df3dRNQ

 

Yeah, looks like 45220-04020 is the guy. Here's the Toyota TSB: http://contentm.mkt2319.com/lp/1443/19128/T-SB-0057-12.pdf

 

Installed the new shaft today and problem is gone. The instructions on the TSB are kind of silly. They act as though the shaft will be loose on the splines once the clamp is loosened ("pull up and out") when everything needs to be hammered on to get it to move. And this is an Arizona truck. Not too terrible overall though, except that I put it back together one spline off and my steering wheel is about 3 degrees off now. I'm going to live with it for a while I think. A bungee cord is not a suitable substitute for a real steering wheel holder, but who has one of those?

 

Good to know.

 

Some info that might help other folks: The zip tie mod was not helping anymore and I was getting a clunk even with a new doorman shaft (not OEM), crawled under the car to look at the bushings on the rack while a friend was turning the wheels, seemed like way too much play like around 1 cm side to side. Went about the hassle of changing the bushings to poly bushings and it seemed to remove the noise completely. Thinking that the excess play was wearing out and introducing way more stress on the intermediate shaft than normal.

 

Seems to have worked! There’s a little bit of clunk left so I might try a larger zip tie