Well, I went and did it. Grafted electric power steering into the Pantera. I'm going to be running 295s up front, reset the castor to 6.5' and have a pretty wicked backspace with my wheels, so figured I'd probably need some help steering.
This was quite an ugly mod, lots of cutting and fabbing, and new panels, and all the work was in some very tight spaces. Motor was too bulky even after I cut it down to fit in the passenger compartment, so it's nestled in the front subframe. I had already made an access panel into the front truck, ends up it was 100% required for this mod to see whats going on. Still have some work to do, need to finish and clean up the wiring and then pot all the connections, but other than that its done.
EPS unit is a solid shaft, so if power/motor dies you still have steering. The gearbox does take some force to turn though without power assist, but nothing crazy. Unit has variable power assist and the sensitivity of the torque sensor is adjustable as well.
So far so good regarding the system. Car is on a dolly so not sure how it acts with the wheels, but on the bench test with a breaker bar attached the motor pulled itself out of the vice.
I do have an issue with the system shutting off when you're turning the wheel extremely quickly and then jerk it back the other direction. Think its due to the fact I'm running it on a 10 amp power supply and it needs ~40-50 amps based on the fusing, need to pull a car battery and see (motor is the size of a starter, and my multimeter doesn't have a recall feature so guessing here)
Even if I don't like it, I can replace the motor with just a straight section of DD shaft and I'm right back to standard manual steering.
Dave
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