Steering shaft reverse rotation gearbox - help

[Lefttoright]

Hi,I'm new to this forum. It looks like a really useful resource.

I have a problem at the moment I was hoping someone may able to shed some light on. I am in Australia and work in the field of left to right steering conversions for vehicle imported from overseas, mainly the USA. Pickups, sports cars and the like.

The problem I have at the moment is that I am trying to find a gearbox to reverse the rotation of the steering shaft in a vehicle and I don't seem to be able to find an off the shelf item that is suitable. The gearbox needs to be a simple shaft in one side and shaft out the other with the opposite rotation. Small, about 110mm across. Max load = 600 Nm. Low speed (how fast can you turn a steering wheel). Must be able to be adjusted for wear. Zero backlash.

So far all the gearboxes have excessive backlash for my application or they can not be adjusted for wear. I have found a few V drive gearboxes of suitable size from other vehicle however as these do not reverse the rotation they are not suitable.

Anyone out there know of a suitable gearbox available or a company to approach to design/manufacture one? I would perfer to use someone located in the USA or Australia if possible.

Cheers

 

[JayMaechtlen]

or move the steering rack to avoid the reversal problem?
Find a rack more nearly symetric so you can get the steering shaft there without flipping the r&p assy?

regards
Jay



Jay Maechtlen

http://home.covad.net/~jmaechtlen/

 

[notnats]

A set of differential gears from a small car might be in a small enough package for your purpose, but you would need to build a suitable housing

Jeff

 

[Lefttoright]

The reason the reversal box is needed is because the original rack has been rotated 180 degrees to put the power head on the RH side of the vehicle. This then put the pinion on the wrong side of the rack so the reversal box is needed to counteract this problem.

The reason for not using a replacement rack in this particular situation is that the vehicle has variable effort steering and active handling. Going the way we are we keep the relationship between number of turns and steering angle exactly right. Tiny discrepencies in that rotation have caused me problems in the past.