The car was placed on jack stands, and the front suspension disassembled as necessary to compare some of the tests. The Moore TR3A was parked in the same garage, and although its suspension has also been rebuilt, its steering is noticeably easier than Heide's car.

By a process of elimination, (disconnecting the center tie rod from the vertical link, idler arm, steering box etc. sequentially) the high friction torque was isolated to the front wheels rotating on the vertical link alone, i.e., disconnected from the center tie rod. By disconnecting the ball joint first, and then turning the vertical link on the screw threads on the lower trunnion, it was finally determined that the friction had been caused by the upper end of the vertical link. The new ball joints were investigated, and found to be extremely hard to rotate, contributing greatly to the hard steering. After returning one set to TRF, and getting another set elsewhere almost as tight. The decision was made to slightly readjust the seating force on the upper ball joint (note: Herman is a professional precision machinist) to decrease the friction without making the joint loose. This was done, and greatly improved the friction torque; but that wasn't the total answer-not by a long shot!

Herman noticed that when he rotated the vertical link on the machine screw thread in the lower trunnion, the hole in the top had a lot of runout. In other words, the vertical link was apparently bent. The other side was also checked and was also found to be "bent". Now, the amount of runout (Total Indicated Runout) in the original was ¾ inch. In other words, the center of the hole in the vertical link moved +/- 3/8 inch from the center of the hole. What this means is that as the vertical link rotates with the upper ball joint installed, it has to move the Upper Wishbone Arm Assembly +/- 3/8 inch. I think you can understand that if the lower trunnion is well worn and the threads are real sloppy, the vertical link being bent won't be trying to push the wishbone around, but it will cause other problems.

Now, how can the Upper Wishbone Assembly move if the Lower Trunnion Assembly is new and the threads are precise and tight? ONLY by compressing the bushings in the upper wishbone arm. In the case of a really soft bushing, which allows the wishbone to wiggle around a lot, the steering could be pretty easy with a bent vertical link. But imagine if the bushing were steel-or something real stiff, then you can imagine that the steering would get very hard to turn. Now think about the reason we like the polyurethane upper wishbone bushings –they are stiffer than the old rubber bushing! And probably will make a TR with less than perfect vertical links steer harder.

Herman was able to go through 5 vertical links Bob Youngdahl had, and found 1 out of the 5 that had a runout less than 1/32 TIR. Reassembled, one side of the car now steers easily. He is still looking for a vertical link to go on the passenger side.

The conclusions we reached were these:

These are only a couple of the numerous reasons a TR3 will steer hard.

A TR front suspension, rebuilt with new trunnions, with (lower vertical link) screw threads in real good shape, new as-currently-available ball joints, but a bent vertical link, will probably steer harder with polyurethane bushings than the original type softer wishbone bushings.

If the screw threads in the link or the trunnion are pretty well worn and sloppy, it probably won't steer much harder.

We have not been able to find factory machining tolerances for concentricity of the screw thread to the hole in the upper link was originally. BUT, being a production part, and being of a design that had pre-War 2 roots, its possible that the tolerance never was very tight from the factory. It didn't matter very much since the bushes were soft.