I had set the seat/steering wheel relationship to fit me during the initial installation, but when my wife sat in the car with the seat adjusted so that she could reach the clutch properly, the steering wheel was too close to her chest. Of course, she IS a little vertically challenged! I’m not allowed to use the “S” word!

I had originally intended to use most of the steering column from the Chevy Equinox that the electric steering unit came out of and just add a simple top section to dress it up. This was the original setup.



It was obvious that plan wasn't going to work. No amount of fiddling with the column position resulted in a location that felt right to both of us and I wasn't going to let her drive it with the wheel too close. Sooooo, I drug (dragged?) out some more of the junk that I've collected over the years and went to work.

At a swap meet, somewhere many moons ago, I had picked up a tilt/telescoping GM column out of a C4 Corvette and it had been kicking around the shop for a while. It was a little loose in the tilt joint and I remember it was cheap because of that. Most folks don't want to tear into one of these columns, but they aren't really that bad, just a little fiddly. I repaired my first tilt GM column back in the 70's and have been tinkering with them in various projects ever since. For the most part, they are all the same inside.

I cut this one down as short as I dared, repaired it and fitted it to the Equinox power unit. Luckily, I have a big box of assorted column parts as well as a few old column tubes and shafts stuck back from previous jobs. The real tricky part was getting the ignition and dimmer switch operating rods cut down and bent to fit and operate reliably. I had to take it apart so many times, that I made a couple of undersize tilt pins to keep from wearing out the holes they go in. The pins are hardened steel and the tilt knuckles are die castings. The pins are a press fit and it doesn't take a lot of abuse to stretch the pot metal knuckles.

This is the "tool" I made at least 30 years ago to compress the spring under the lock plate in a tilt column. When I was younger, I would find a big helper and have him push the plate down far enough to remove the retaining clip, but it definitely works better with the tool. I did have to add a couple of square tool bits under the tool because the legs weren't long enough for the telescoping column.





For what it's worth, the tilt and tilt/tele columns are pretty much the same from the turn signal switch down. The tele column is just a regular tilt column with the telescoping parts added to the top. That's why they are longer by several inches and this is why I had to make the column so short. The tele column required me to add a couple of square tool bits under the legs of my homemade tool to be long enough, but it still worked ok.

This is how the telescoping lock works. A screw, a push rod and a tilting wedge inside the shaft.