steering wheel slack

I have just replaced all of the ball joints and all inner and outer tie rod ends and I still have a little bit of slack in the steering. The truck has 200,000 miles so it is to be expected. So all of the slack is in the rack. I was wondering if there is any way to adust that like you can adjust the gearbox on trucks with no rack and pinion steering. Thinking about how they work, it makes since that thier wouldent be but I figured it couldent hert to ask.

 

I don't think there's any adjustment in racks. I think the only thing left to check would be your steering shafts from the column to the rack.

 

Holy crap that's an insane write up!

 

Yup ^ that fixed my issue I was having.

 

Thanks jberry, Im at work now but I will look into it as soon as I get home in the morning. That looks to be what im dealing with.

 

If you have the original 99 rack there is a good chance you have the old style "rack guide". Upgrading to the new style will remove "up and down" play found, and most pronounced at the driver side of the rack shaft.
More info on that (and the rest of the rack) can be found here.
http://www.tacomaworld.com/forum/1s...rack-pinion-service-tools-tips-dry-wordy.html

Less than that if you know what you are doing. As the author of "post 42" I highly recommend following up with shimming the "tilt steering pivot ball" if the desired end result is totally smooth, fluid and slop free steering. It takes all of an additional ten minutes.

 

Check your rack bushings also.

http://www.lieblweb.com/steeringbush.html

 

I did the steering mod Tuesday night. Took about 2 hours. 1 bolt at the floor on the lower part of the shaft. 2 allen bolts at the wheel, 2 tilt springs, onplug the wiring and the column falls into your lap. The only thing I didn't like at first was it made my steering tighter. But, as I thought about it, the steering now seems like it did when I bought the truck new.

edit... you have to take the cowling off to bet to the 2 allen bolts so add 3 phillips screws to the hardware to remove the column.

 

I checked it out this morning and I definitely have slack there, I think the pivot ball also has some so I will be doing the mod there as well. Thanks for the tips guys this should be an easy fix and improve the steering by a ton.

 

I done some more poking around last night and it appears to have a lot of slack around the rack as well. When you turn the wheel the whole end of the rack seems to bow up. When I started doing this project I looked for the rack bushings I have been reading about on this site but couldent find them. With the post that dirty pool listed Im wondering if I should just buy a new rack all together because I don't have access to the tools necessary to upgrade to the new style rack guide. And by the time I pay for it to be done and replace the bushings, Im sure I could just replace the whole thing. Am I off base here?
Its weird, I swear I looked for the bushing but now when I priced the rack, I go strait to them LOL