Steering Shaft Play

Alright, so in my 2000 Western Star, I noticed as I parked today that the steering wheel had about 1/8th of a turn of play. Completely loose and not moving the tires at all. I've been shaking and breaking this thing for the past few days on a gravel road that would put most deep southern wash board backed blue grass bands to shame. It's bumpy as all get out and things have been breaking left right and centre. One of those "fix it when I get home" kind of jobs. I only have a day left but this steering thing worries me.

On the steering box right now, a circular nut tightened clamp is resting on top of it. It must have slid down the steering shaft after it shook off of something but the trick is that I don't know if I should be looking for whatever it clamped on to, what could have broken off or what. Kind of at a loss for this one. It's a problem I've never had to deal with so some one care to help shed some light on what I could be facing for a repair?

Cheers

 

Yes sir I can!

This is the steering shaft at the box with the clamp I mentioned resting on top.

http://www.canadiancrier.ca/images/steershaft1.jpg

And this is the steering shaft going into the firewall.

http://www.canadiancrier.ca/images/steershaft2.jpg

Unfortunately I'm working off a blackberry at the moment so I can't resize and post them here so just follow the URLs suppose. But yeah, that clamp just comes off the rubber piece in the second picture. No biggy now, i just wasn't sure what it was or what I should be looking for. I was scared something had fallen off somewhere and disappeared.

Poking around, I've noticed that in fact the piece that connects to the splines on the steering box's shaft there is loose though. Also I was wrong earlier about the amount of play as I was in a bit of a rush. there's about a third of a turn of free play on the wheel before the tires get nudged. I hope this doesn't mean my steering box is borked. Those're expensive! I'm just not sure if that amount of play is normal or not because that rubber piece at the firewall normally restricts that play by creating some constriction on the steering shaft eh? So I'm not used to the completely free and unrestricted movement of the wheel without that clamp tightened up.

 

He do indeed. It's parked in my driveway now with a laundry list of repairs so this'll be part and parcel of it all. What if the only place I see any excess play is the shaft that comes up out of the steering box? what could be wrong in that case?

 

Yeah i was thinking after seeing where that clamp goes that it can't be overtly useful. I put it back anyway, enough to hold on to the seal but no more.

If I take the truck to the shop to have the slack on the steering box adjusted, I assume that's a simple 5-10 minute jobby?

I do need to replace the piece that slips over top of the splines but I'm scratching my noggin over that one because I don't know how to seperate that part from the steering shaft...like I'm not sure how to seperate that u-joint. Granted I haven't actually looked closely at it and was going to wait for morning to really get a good look but is there a special way to separate that u-joint or am I going to look at it in daylight and be like, "Oh! It's just that nut or whatever!"