Look for posts by Don Shillady on this forum He went thru this exact thing. I think that you manually turn the tab at the end of the column into what would correspond with the "neutral" position which will let your key turn all the way to start your car,but should not engage the steering wheel lock, then cut it off flush with the column casing and weld it to the casing so that it can't inadvertanyly turn afterwards-----it would be mega bad news if you were driving down the road and it vibrated around to the "lock steering wheel" position. I tried to disassemble a G.M. tilt column with a shifter mounted on it, thinking that perhaps I could remove the shifter arm and rotate the sleeve so that the hole in it for the shifter arm would be at the bottom, not noticable.-----big mistake-----I ended up with a big damn mess. Ended up buying a tilt column from Ididit for about a zillion dollars and installing it in my roadster pickup instead.---Very nice unit, but rich, very rich.