Club 80-90 Forums

The steering on my - now nearly perfect - bus is not quite right. It feels a bit stiff and has a tendency to stick in spots. Nothing serious but enough to feel wrong and annoy me.

Can I lubricate this or loosen something or is it more serious?

1985 Westy 1.6TD

Have you got power steering/ If so may be low on fluid

No, no such luxuries.

Could be a stiff joint somewhere or steering box dry/on the way out. Jack the front up and try and isolate it?

I should have said before but I hear a scraping noise when I steer, sort of a plastic against plastic sound - not that I'm accoustically qualified in any way. It seems to come from within the steering wheel column, higher up rather than lower.

try giving the plastic cowling around the column a nudge with your hand when it does that. Mine rubs against the wheel occasionally.

One of mine does that too, scraping noise... hard to isolate that I've found and it annoys jenny more than me.

But if your steering is definitely sticky, then you should definitely track it down asap. They're normally lovely and light

Just for those searching this forum who have similar problems: The stiff steering was related to poor tyres / low tyre pressure, I changed them and it is lovely and light now.

The scraping noise was where a part of the circular copper ring that makes the connection for the horn had come loose and moved against the plastic. I found this out as I was driving through a busy little village and my van had a panic attack and started to insanely sound the horn all by itself. Everyone was staring at me, it was painfully embarrassing. The copper ring had pulled away completely so I just took it all the way off and now I have no horn at all - much better than the intermittent hissy fits I was suffering before.

Thanks for the update Ols, it wouldn't be a bad idea to just rig up a simple flick switch for the horn somewhere in the dashboard, for MOT purposes

That's not a bad idea, although the intention is to buy a new steering wheel when I can get round to finding something suitable second-hand. I also need to address the rather depressing thoroughly-rusted-gutter issues, on driving back into Europe it rained on the van after many dry months and it sprung a leak. Poor van, I love it to bits, but I suspect fixing this will cost me big.

If its into the roof a wee bit as well as the gutter, you'll need to pope the head-lining out. Everyone says they pop back in quite easily!

Someone with a MIG can usually patch those holes up one way or another... someone good probably in not too much time. Grind them down and get some primer-filler in them pronto, and them some good top coat.

Check out the 'rollering' thread...