It’s been dry and mild here in Maryland for the past three weeks. Sunny, uncharacteristically warm weather yielded three weeks to enjoy beautiful changing leaves; usually there’s one day of beautiful color, it rains, and the trees are gray and naked until March. There’s also been lots of dry sunlight to work on the truck in shirtsleeves. The forecast for Sunday, however, was for rain, so I decided to visit the local pick & pull for some parts before everything turned into cold soupy mud. I was on the hunt for an electric steering unit from a 2009-2013 Toyota Corolla, and the app told me they had two on the lot. I carried in a metric-based tool roll and impact driver, and found the first car after a few minutes of confusion. Someone had already pulled the dash mostly apart, and most crucially, pulled the lower linkage from the bottom of the steering unit. The second Corolla on the lot didn’t have electric steering assist at all. So I consulted the website for alternatives and found a donor 2009 Nissan Versa several rows over that hadn’t been touched. It only took me several minutes to deconstruct the dashboard to get to the motor, and after a half an hour I figured out how to get it detached from the wheel, off the dashboard, and on the floor. Then I put a socket on the bottom of the linkage and with one mighty pull, got it disconnected from the car.
Back at the house, I laid it out on the bench, tested the motor on 12V power, and verified it worked. Laying it out on the floor with the two columns I’ve got, I’m not sure if I can use either one to make a new unit, but I think the one from the green truck will be the best candidate. Most likely I’ll cut the shaft at the bottom to disconnect it from the power steering unit at the bottom and find a way to construct one good unit out of the two. We’ll see.
The theory here is to have a unit that doesn’t need a computer or any other input to regulate the motor; with no signal from the CAN BUS, the attached ECU (that silver box) will always provide average power assist and return the wheel to center at any speed in what’s called fail-safe mode; and if the motor fails, it just reverts to manual steering. This is what Brian has on his Scout and it’s pretty slick—and his unit was from a Versa as well. Having driven his truck with both the manual and the power steering I can say it makes a huge difference, which is why I’m pursuing this project.
With my welder down, I had to pivot to smaller projects. As mentioned earlier, I had a bunch of things I wanted to knock out, and I got a fair bit of them done. First, I decided to use locknuts and washers to button up my mirrors. It took some travel to find someone with the correct stainless hardware in stock, but once I had that I got the passenger side closed up and mounted on the truck with little hassle. I’m glad I pulled the driver’s side off, because when I went to take the nuts off the rod snapped on both sides as it had on the other one. This was easy to put together, and it mounted quickly. Now both sides of the truck have refurbished, adjustable, period-correct mirrors.
Finally, I started to hunt down live wires on the rear of the truck. There’s a trailer plug with a tangle of wires hanging below the hitch that I can’t identify, so I turned the marker lights on and tested them for continuity. Nothing seemed to work. Another rusted bulb was hanging under the truck, so I tried that one as well; no dice. Looking up. I remembered there was a mystery wire running out of the rear quarter into the back of the door, and put the test wire on that: power! And turning the markers off killed it. So I put a splice on the wire from the license plate holder, connected it to the mystery wire, and used some new stainless hardware to permanently mount the assembly to the rear door. So that’s one more requirement checked off for a street-legal truck; unfortunately now the headlights aren’t working and the front turn signals aren’t lighting. So there’s more work to do.