Steering Rack and Slave Cylinder

     Hi, it's been a while since I've posted. After I got the car in mobile condition, I was burnt out on it and spent a couple weeks recouping. Unfortunately some things elsewhere came up, like selling my daily to buy another one, moving across the country, and getting someone to ship this damn car across the country. So that took my time and money for a good few months. The RX-8 project is no longer on the backburner, and will continue in full force :) 

    When I was putting the car together, I wanted to put some emphasis on how to get the clutch system to work, and also how to hook up the steering rack. Since the steering rack is lowered about 1-2 inches, the stock steering column is now too short to reach the rack. You need to use a Lexus IS250 Steering Column U-Joint, part number 45206-30112. It looks like this picture below. We want to use this piece to extend from the steering rack, to connect to the stock RX-8 U-Joint on the steering column. The part I have circled in red is what we need from it. So we need to separate it from the rest of the U-Joint.

    I used a combination of PB Blaster, an air hammer, a regular hammer, a vice, and pure brute force to try and remove this. There's nothing holding it in except for a lot of friction, so depending on if your part is brand new or if it's used, this may be easy or difficult to do. You basically need to bash it off back and forth and jimmy it out of the splines. It took me about a solid 30 minutes to remove this.

    Once you have it off, you can put the female side onto the steering rack itself. Now you need to cut the steering column, the part with the splines that used to connect into the steering rack. Back when I did this I took a lot of pictures, but unfortunately they somehow didn't transfer when I switched phones, so bear with me over just text for this one. For me, I had to cut off enough of it so that the stock U-Joint could go all the way up to where the splines end. Once I put the U-Joint back onto the steering column, I attached it to the Lexus piece. After this, the steering was hooked up. 

For the slave cylinder, I ended up having to do a couple things to make it fit. The slave cylinder interferes with the adapter plate, so I had to move it forward. Moving it forward meant that I needed to, A, make a bracket to hold it in place, and B, cut the pin to compensate for moving it forward. Here is the line on the pin that I needed to cut, and the test bracket I made to see if it would fit. Do not cut the pin any further back than this, as it can cause you to blow the seal out.

    So now, the top hole of the slave cylinder attaches to the bracket, the bottom hole of the slave cylinder goes through the bracket and attaches to the transmission. But what about the bottom hole of the adapter? Since there's no room to put a bolt there, I created an alignment pin and threaded it into the transmission. I did this by cutting a bolt, then using JB-Weld on the threads to keep it locked in. When you put the slave cylinder into the car, the piston will move back/in a bit as you're trying to push the slave cylinder forward to align with the holes in the transmission.

    Now, when you finally are ready to bleed it, you need to be VERY careful not to blow the seal. Let the brake fluid gravity feed to the slave cylinder first, then very slowly and gently push the clutch pedal only partially down the first few times you're bleeding.

    That concludes the end of this post, as this point the drive-train is complete on the RX-8. It still needs the following:

• Exhaust manifold
• Intake manifold
• Throttle Body Adapter for RX-8 Throttle Body
• Fuel rail/FPR/Injectors
• Wiring/ECU

    Stay tuned :)