Cue the skull and driveshaft pic...

Looks like Taco turned his computer off. I've got it bookmarked for later cringe-inducing viewing.

That looks perfectly safe to me. Didn't that guy used to be an engineer for Ford?

Is this on a Golf sporting a caster in place of a conventional rear wheel, by any chance?

@Skydiver:

For some reason, the link is wonky. It won't work as a "open as a new tab" on my browser, but rather only as a simple click.

It's also no less than about 6 years old, as that's about when I remember first reading it.

you killed the poor mans PC!

We crashed his site (ironic, no?) My error message was "Too many Jalopniks are trying to get here. You go away now. Come back maybe later." Or something like that.

My old boss (when I worked in a garage) told a story about one of the times he was doing tech inspections for the Hershey Hillclimb. A guy was racing a VW Bug with a Porsche motor. Thing was, it was a really old Bug with a piece of leather acting as an integral part of the steering system. My boss failed the guy because the leather was worn and frayed. They guy got all pissed off and made a scene yelling. He went to drive the bug away from tech and the leather promptly let go.

They guy had the class to come back and thank my boss for probably saving his life.

Wow.

The deeply troubling part about so many of those is the attention to detail spent on other aspects of the car, or maybe the apparently decent fabrication skills some have...but then they run mind-blowingly retarded steering linkages.

Wow. That pic makes some of my mods look slightly less idiotic than they used to.

The 'site' is up, the link in the article post just needs fixing:

[128.83.80.200]

And there's a couple more pages of such steering....arrangements....on consecutive pages linked at the bottom.

Add a little duck tape and that'll do just fine.

Obviously this guy lives in a place that does not require regular inspections of vehicle safety by a qualified professional. This contraption would be an instant MOT failure in the UK, he wouldn't be allowed to leave before the mechanic fixed it.

"HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected
Internet Information Services"

Look, he's been /Jalopniked!

Yay us! :)

Looks alot like the master cylinder on my '84 Chevy K-10. In the process of converting from diesel to gas, one of the previous owners ditched the diesel hydraulic or whatever boosted brakes for plain old vacuum bootsed brakes. It required a large steel plate and LOTS of washers. Reminds me, I need to at least pick up some grade 8 bolts.

@Adamskiy: Nope. No it's not.

I have no idea what is wrong with any of those steering setups. Can I still read jalopnik?

@rgseidl: See? You and your silly nanny-state.

Yet another reason the USA rules.

I really needed a laugh this afternoon... You can always count on the Jalops!

@Andrewpetty: Yes, but we reserve the right to think less of you.

"This is the typical monster truck set up if you just happen hang out with dim witted mouth breathing butt munch fuckstick monster truck fabricators who quit paying any attention over a decade ago and couldn't fabricate their way out of a UV damaged extra sensitive ribbed condom!"

if this guy doesn't win some literary prize for his website, I don't know what will.

"128.83.80.193 is taking too long to respond"
"temporarily unavailable or too busy"

Jalopnik has killed his hamsters!

@Andrewpetty: Things like the center of gravity (COG) and weight transfer have a huge impact on steering. You can define steering as moving weight in a certain direction. To have control of where you're going, you have to control your weight.

Also, the parts have to be strong enough to withstand the forces (the weight) placed on them. Raise the ride height, you'll raise the COG. The steering (tie-rods, steering shaft, steering box, etc.) is going to have to work quite a bit harder than it was originally designed to do. Driving on any road, but especially off-road, things will vibrate, be sumbitted to shock, be flexed, etc. You have to accomodate for that. These guys have taken (bad) shortcuts.

"Look, he's been /Jalopniked!

Yay us! :)"

and

" "temporarily unavailable or too busy"

Jalopnik has killed his hamsters! "

OK, MOFOs! It didn't kill them, but it did get them breathing heavy! Ha ha! I've since redirected scary steering traffic to another [equally weak] machine so it should help some. That scary steering stuff is years old and gets rediscovered occasionally, but nobody's flogged the hampsters like you fawkers!

@SpeedWagon: That's weird, because I'm running a $25 Pentium II webserver box with the usual Debian/Apache/etc crap out of my crawlspace, over a residential-quality cable internet connection, and it handles the traffic just fine when I link to pages on it from Jalopnik. I can't imagine a lower-end setup than what I've got, unless perhaps this guy is using dialup.

That IP address is in a range given to the University of Texas at Austin.

I'd avoid their engineering course.

can't be any worse than some of the lowered or ricers rides as well...if it can be bolted on, its gotta be good

@Murilee Martin: It's mostly a matter of bandwidth. A 486 can saturate a 10 Mbit ethernet line with static web content if the number of clients isn't too great.

Well, at least this guy used steel components...

Ive seen tie rod ends held on with electrical conduit.

@FLB and Andrewpetty: Not so much the weight, but the height difference is what makes most of these so bad.

Typically you want your drag link (from the steering box to the axle) to be horizontal, or least set up to match the suspension links movement. If you don't do this, whenever the suspension moves up and down, it affects your steering direction. i.e. when you go down, the wheels go left, up-->right. The more vertical your drag link is, the worse this gets.

Additionally, the loads placed on the steering linkages are huge pretty much on matter what. There's a reason there aren't any welded components in your steering bits: they're usually solid steel or cast iron.

...which is to say bent rebar is definitely not what you want keeping your car going straight.

Yay death wobble!

Not that it matters to anyone, but I do internet sales... which is why I get to post here all day, heh.

@Kuang: I have a friend of mine at the U of TX in Austin...he's a PhD mechanical engineer there but he does 1/2-assed fixes like this on his cars ALL the time (BTW, he owns not one but TWO 1968 Imperials and a '66 Volvo 122...all of which, near as I can tell, are held together with pieces of wire he found on the side of the road and rubber tubing.)

Awesome. I ran across this site myself ages ago. It's really horrible what some people will drive.