Steering wheel angle

[TomC]

On my first truck, I had manual steering. I drove that truck for 8 years, then bought my present truck with power steering. The gear ratio on manual steering is slower than power. And the trick was to keep the lower king pin well greased. The main reason it is so hard to drive a power steering vehicle when the power fails, is the fast gear ratio of the power steering box. Good Luck, TomC

[jackhanow]

All I know is that when mine shut down because the wire broke off the oil switch, and i was rolling about 10 mph. i was glad i had a big steering wheel. It took all i had to get it off the road and the pavement only went a foot past the white line.

[shelled]

My first bus was a GM PD-3751 with a big flat steering wheel and not even a hint of power steering.  I regularly traversed city alleys and parked in places that wouldn't be easy in a full size automobile despite the fact that I was a 132 pound 6'2 sedentary type.

The trick was learning to "shuffle" the steering wheel and you just plain can't do that with a steering wheel that is tilted very much.  With power steering and a small tilted wheel, you tend to keep one or both hands on the steering wheel for complete revolutions of the wheel whereas the shuffle involves relatively short coordinated moves using both hands on only the section of the steering wheel nearest you.  Someone like RJ could better describe this than I can.

Mechanical advantage and alignment are important ingredients that differ radically as noted above between OEM power and non-power steering setups so remember when you talk about steering wheel angle, you're talking about just one part of a whole system and don't forget the driver IS an important part of the system.

edward

[Lin]

My first bus came with no power steering whatsoever.  I looked into an air assist but installed integral power instead.  We changed out the original steering column for one we got out of a Cadillac in a scrap yard.  We therefore had tilt and telescope on it.  Because of the angel the column was installed at the amount of tilt ended up being relatively conservative, but I did like steering with it.  Since this only had  standard car size wheel, I did feel that it would need some wrestling to get off the road should the system go out.  I probably should have increased the size from 14 to 18.

We have the hydraulic power assist on the 5a, and it is acceptable.  I like the integral better but not so much as to pay for the change.  I think that the vast number of large motorhomes and professional bus conversions use power steering and wheels designed for drive-ability. I would assume that there have been power steering failures some times.  Have you ever come across reports of catastrophes related to them?  Do you carry a crank in case your starter fails? 

[TomC]

Even if you did have a crank, you couldn't budge a Diesel engine by hand.

[Lin]

Hey Tom, What about using a cordless drill!

Anyway, to get back to he topic, my point is that with power steering as with many other things you work out the best compromise system.  It would be overly optimistic to ignore the possibility of failure but overly pessimistic to design everything as if it is sure to fail immediately.