[HO455]

Originally Posted by LockDoc

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You can loosen all of the brackets that hold the column in place and slide it up enough to release the pressure on it probably. There is about 3/4 - 1" adjustment on it up and down. If it is an auto you might have to re-adjust the shifter rod at the top. Another option would be to heat the intermediate shaft until the plastic melts and collapse it a little.

I am betting that the column slid down before it was tightened down originally.

LockDoc

Hats off to Doc! I loosened the bolts and like magic everything came into alignment.

Well maybe not quite that easy. But moving the column up 1/8" was all that was needed followed by readjusting the spring tension to get the upper bearing to stay on the race and balance that with the shift lever detent tension.

The PO's metric bolt conversion didnt fail and it was mostly just a matter of dealing with the damaged emergency brake mounting. Which I'm sure I have mentioned in the past. I have to put nuts on the Ebrake mounting bolts as the captive nuts are all stripped. Basically the PO took a Sawzall to the dash when the Cadillac column was installed. The result is several parts of the dash are deformed, some of the spot welds are broken, and the nuts are stripped.

Once all that was reassembled I need to replace the ignition coil. The old one was damaged by a veg move on my part. DHOO!

As part of the bleeding of air from the new steering components the directions said to disable the ignition and crank the engine while turning the wheel. My failure was I didn't disconnect the power to the coil I merely removed the coil wire. Then to compound that error twice I forgot to turn the ignition switch to off while I checked the pump reservoir fluid level. The end result of this was the engine didn't want to idle correctly when I stepped into the four barrels the engine began shooting ducks.

After carefully checking for vacuum leaks and throwing a timng light on it to confirm it hadn't moved. I through an old coil I had on to see if the problem went away. That fixed the duck shooting! Some interweb research backed up this conclusion. The high output 12v coils are not very robust compared to a standard coil. This makes sense to me as they are putting a larger amount of winding in the same size package which means less area for cooling.

No photos this time around. The camera was dead and most of all of this is rework.