I did my drag links today. I'd been annoyed by a funny little clicking noise that you could both hear, and feel through the steering. It happened only if you took a long gradual curve, then straightened up. But this was classically a symptom of worn balls.

And worn they were:



The one on top was more than 2mm narrower than the second-hand replacement on the left, much more like a rugby ball than a football.

Oddly enough, the one on the other side of the car (the left hand side) was hardly worn at all, though its rubber boot was in much worse condition. Presumably at some time one had been changed and the other hadn't? Or is wear on one side like this common, maybe?

Dennis,
I wondered at first which vehicle you were working on, since an A series has no drag links, nor has any vehicle which uses rack and pinion steering...

http://www.ecas2cvparts.co.uk/track-lev ... -1222.html

Anyhow, having got that out of the way, it's very common on later cars for the 'track rod end lever arm' balls to suffer rapid wear.
In fact I've just replaced both of them during a chassis change which I'm working on at the moment.
The car had only covered 38,000 miles and someone had already attacked the lever arms with a file (or maybe an angle grinder) in an attempt to restore them to being spherical, rather than ovoid.
Needless to say, that attempt was a failure.

I've fitted some 'old but good' items, btw, which is probably what's happened with your car.

ken

Hi Ken

confused even with a picture to help? I thought it was just me that felt like that nowadays!

There was this piece that had appeared a couple of times in some magazine I used to read, and maybe that was what misled me.



I notice that both the dreadful Mr Haynes and the entire French nation call them "steering levers" ("leviers direction"), so maybe that would be a better name.

Anyhow, having got that out of the way, I'm still curious that the wear has been so much on one side and so very little on the other. What I found when I took them apart was one very worn one indeed, and the other one pretty well OK. Either they were both originals (= uneven wear from the start), or one had been replaced at some time in the past and not the other (= whoever did it back then thought it was uneven wear at that time).

I suppose there's a third possibility: whoever did it back then was a lazy idiot......

But it's not a very high-mileage vehicle (about 80,000 miles from memory), and I think it must just be the quality of the steel balls.

Mine now has two very similar "old but good" steering levers (oh, that's track rod end lever arm balls to you, Ken)

Dennis,
A drag link was required with older designs of steering systems, where rotary motion from the steering box needed to be converted into linear motion.
Rack and pinion steering systems do not have, nor do they need, a drag link...

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DoYa ... nk&f=false

Thanks for the explanation Ken, and now with a bit of luck I will know the difference (unlike the author of that article). My own Shorter Oxford Dictionary has nothing between "drag line" and "drag queen", so I was quite at a loss. But perhaps if I stick to steering lever when talking about 2CVs no-one could possibly be confused? "Track rod end lever arm with ball" is a bit of a mouthful.

I thought I'd see how common "track rod" and "drag link" were, in a few other books besides Hillier's Fundamentals of Motor Vehicle Technology, Book 1.

Instead of finding out anything useful, I discovered that it seems that people stopped talking about their steering round about 1920, and didn't really start again until after WWII.

And I still don't know about the irregular wear.....

No matter how much of a mouthful track rod end lever arm with ball is what they're called. Coming from the sailing fraternity I'm dead set against further confusing the lexis with 'alternative names' for things that already have established names.

(Going About is probably one of the most well known (and feared) terms amongst non-sailors. A sailing school I once worked for tried to teach the kids to ready to turn instead with the result that once they got into boats with experienced sailors they were all hit over the head with the boom because they weren't familiar with the well known ready to go about). Names may not make sense, but why add additional wordage to a complex vocabulary.

It is what it is.

http://www.ecas2cvparts.co.uk/track-lever-with-ball-left-hand-2cvdyane-important-notes-p-1222.html.

The article was written by the late Vic Moran. In my second year of editorship I re-ran some of his articles from the early 2000s with the proviso that they were 'of the time.' Opinions/tech/prices change. Interestingly an article in this month's magazine advised people to half fill their oil sumps...

One of the most requested ideas I used to receive was that of 'accredited' techies writing in the mag. The types who buy an 'off the shelf' or 'built to spec' 2cv seem to want a defined set if 'rules' for running their cars. But now I digress onto other hang ups...

Drag link is definitely wrong - as I said, I blamed that magazine, and a couple of people apparently called "Vic" and "Sam", but maybe it needs a better illustration:



I am not completely convinced that just because ECAS calls it a "Track rod end lever arm with ball" that we should, too. Other publications - for example this one - call it either a tie rod arm or a track rod arm.

And much though I dislike suggesting anyone should ever do what Haynes says, the BoL does call it the same thing as the French, i.e a steering lever:



So I can't say there's a great deal of agreement about what to call it. Though I'm still surprised Ken didn't recognise it from the picture.

[Edit: I should say I found Vic Moran's article on servicing the whatever-I-should-call-thems extremely clear and a very helpful guide to doing the job. I'd only add that in my case I didn't need the sawn-off 22mm wood-drill to remove the castellated nut - it was only finger tight - but of course for re-tightening and then backing off it was absolutely the right tool]

Vic got all his info for those tech torque articles from the usual sources (Inc Ken) via 2cvl list on yahoo ( it was the internet"Chat" before they invented pictures) and from phoning some of us up. He did a great job gathering information and collating it into informative articles for the club mag and his own 2cvstuff website.

factory referred to it as "controll lever" or "steering arm" depending on translation, which is good enough for me "drag link" suggests steering boxes and WeeGgrey Fergie type agricultural application rather than the (at the time ) standard setting rack and pinion (with centre pickup to reduce bump steer) which is common to most cars now.