Digging Out of the Hole

Last weekend, instead of heading out into the hills for a ride despite the immanent arrival of winter,
I decided to take care of some thing that's been bugging me for a long time. I refer of course to the steering wheel in my Jeep, which has been 90 degrees off since the day I bought it.




Some time ago (2 years or more) I decided to tear into it and see If I could fix the thing figuring it would be as simple as pulling something apart, reorienting the steering wheel and putting it back together. Wrong! And to top it off I managed to ruin the horn and the airbag quit working.

So I borrowed a puller (2 actually, thank you Joe and Steve) and ripped the Jeep apart to discover...

...that I had broken this thingy, according to Jeep, the "Clock Spring" $266.30 A rather expensive goof on my part. If you read the label on the clock spring it says to not do exactly what I had done. Which would have been helpful if the stupid thing wasn't buried underneath a bunch of shit.
I did all this only to discover, that there is only one way the steering wheel will go on, just like the rest of the system, everything is "keyed" to only fit a certain way,

so, 300 bucks and several hours later I'm back where I started.

"Fuck!"

So, after some research, (thank you Google) which I probably should have done, oh, lets say seven years ago, I discover this fancy do-dad underneath the front end.

Basically, you just loosen the two clamps, turn the piece they hold a bunch of times, and viola! The steering wheel now faces the way the Jeep is actually traveling!

Good Times!