According to my Chiltons, some "later model" steering columns have break away capsule in them. When did they start using them? Also, I figure that I don't have them as I flipped my Jeep sixe years back and it still does okay, but it has always been kinda loose. If I find that I have broken capsules, how would I replace them?

Fritz

Jeep...need I say more?

my 77 has one, If its the thing IM thinking about its a plastic sleeve that connects the 2 shafts togehter sort of.

look at where the big shaft goes around the little shaft under the hood, if there are a couple of littel white dots in that are these are the plastic shear pins designed to give when you eat the wheel at 65 and save your life.... in theory.



OzarkJeep

I love the U.S.A.

I think there is more to those so called shear pins then meets the eye.
A couple weeks ago i swapped out my steering column for a waggy column with the automatic shift linkage. The waggy column is about an inch to inch and half longer then the original CJ column, so I had to colapse that connecting shaft. I drilled out the 4 little white dots and tried to push the shaft together. It wouldn't move. After a great deal of beating on it I managed to get it to move in a bit. I wanted to free the whole thing up so I could properly adjust the length so I tried to slide the outer shaft off the inner one. I couldn't get it to move apart because there was no way to hammer in that direction. Anyway, I figured out a way to do it by clamping the inner shaft in a vice about 1/8 inch away from the edge of the outer shaft and then I would wedge a screw driver inbetween the edge of the vice and the outer shaft and pry them apart 1/8 inch at a time. It took awhile to get the two shafts apart but they came apart with out bending things with the hammer.
Anyway, once I got it apart I found that those so called shear pins weren't actually pins. They appear to be just holes where liquid plastic is injected into assembly. There were two grooves about 1/2 inch wide ground around the inner shaft that lined up with the little holes in the outer shaft. The plastic was injected into those two cavities via the little holes. The plastic doesn't realy stick well to the steel but it does make such a tight fit then even when you drill plastic out of the filler holes it still is a PITA to slide the two parts of the shaft. Once I had it all apart I scrapped the rest of the plastic out of the grooves and then put it back together and it slides nice and easy. I don't think you have to have the thing pinned together since there is no way for the thing to slide apart once its installed. The shaft from the Waggy (1980) doesn't even have those pins.
BTW, my CJ is an 82. I don't know if the older CJ were using the same method of pinning the two shafts.