After months of waiting I finally got the steering arm back from the engineers. But the end result was worth the wait. Once painted it is impossible to spot that the arm has been modified. It should also be just as strong as the standard arm was. The original plan was to build up the inside of the hole where the splines used to be by metalspraying. However that was not possible as the hole was too small for the equipment to get in there. So the hole was build up using a TIG welder. After that the hole was turned out on a lathe to the right size to suit the new spline. The Toyota arm was used to make an electrode by pushing a copper plug into the spline to get the exact shape and size of spline as they are slightly tapered. The new spline was then spark eroded into the Niva arm. This is the result.


Now I can fit the steering box to the car. As mentioned before the nice thing about using a Toyota box is that two of the bolt holes already line up. The third one has to be drilled of course. It ends up right next to the third bolthole in the chassis which is a bonus as that means I do not have to fit a tube through the chassis to stop it from being squased as the bolts are tightened.

I did make a plate out of 3mm steel to act as a giant washer and to make thing look tidy.