On an NB Miata power steering rack where is the center of the rack? ......and "the middle" isn't the answer I'm looking for. How do I identify something on the rack to line up with the center line of the frame I'm building? There's a small bracket and a fluid fitting around the middle. Is that the actual center? A point midway between the grooves where the boots are anchored?
Turn the rack from stop to stop, count the turns, turn back halfway. Now the rack is centered in the housing, so if you measure from tie rod to tie rod and go halfway on the housing you've got the center mounting point?
That's how I'd do it.
I centered the steering turns and that's how I found the issue. One tie rod seems to be about an inch and a quarter longer, yet I copied the location of the mounts from a stock Miata sub-frame. Not sure what's going on.
Are the tie rods the same length? Did you go lock to lock in the vehicle, or on the floor? Could be something in the chassis stopping it if its in the car. Do Mee-otters use the internal rack stops, or stops on the spindles? Maybe there is more travel than the car allows.
That all I got just now.
The rack is in a front clip that I welded up and I rotated it lock to lock. There's the same amount of thread exposed on both tie rod ends, which suggests it may not be centered, but I've double checked the measurements against the stock sub-frame. I just figured if I could identify a center point on the rack I could make sure the rack is centered in the clip. If nothing else appears I can just shift it to center the tie rod ends.
If you measure how far the ends of the rack (the actual bar of steel) protrude from the housing, you can center the rack in the housing. From there, you can find the center of the housing, and reference that to your subframe.
I like measuring things with a ruler or tape measure a lot more than counting rotations of the steering wheel. One: because the place I start counting rotations isn't exact, and two: because (as mentioned above) where the "lock" position in the car is might not actually be the end of travel for the rack. Binding and other things can contribute to not actually getting the all of the travel out of the system.
I just did this replacing the rack on my Civic, I got the rack to what seemed like even on both sides, put the outer toe rods on evenly, and then checked the toe. I got the toe close to where I wanted it and kept the threaded portion of the toe rods even from side to side. I then checked the thrust angle compared to the rears, and was pretty close. It does help that I have a set of Flyin Miata hub stands though.
The same place as the 60 foot beam...
Skunk, I don't know what might have gone wrong with the original measurements, but you're checking the right thing now. With the rack centered in the housing, you should have equal length tie rods. That's all that matters.
Patrick said:The same place as the 60 foot beam...
There's one in every crowd....
The mounting backets on the Miata rack are asymmetrical, IIRC the one on the driver side is closer to the center of the car than the one on the passenger side. So another way to measure it is to find the center line on a Miata subframe (say the center point between the lower control arm front bolts) then measure outwards from there to each of the two mounting brackets. Repeat that on the new car.
That's assuming you're using a stock Miata rack and not one that's been shortened to fit inside the nose of a Locost or something.
It sounds like you're on the right track but just to be clear, once you center the rack you should be using the inner tie rod ends for your measurements not the outer.
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