Intermediate Shaft Replacement

[joutlaw]

I got the intermediate shaft out from the engine bay... but inside is proving to be more difficult.

 

It's a tight squeeze in my RCSB with me at 6'3" 250lbs, but from what I can tell the inside bolt is 1/2 inch with with a 15mm nut.

 

Can anyone confirm the socket sizes needed for this job?

[joutlaw]

TTT

 

Also I think my half side may be stripped. Anyone have a good suggestion for getting out a stripped bolt in such a small place? I'm debating just dremmeling it off and getting a bolt from Lowes or somewhere to replace it.

[joutlaw]

Ended up getting this job done. Apparently due to my limited site I couldn't see that the bolt on both connections of the shaft would never move... only the nut could back out. This made it harder b/c for me when the wheel was perfectly straight, I couldn't see this.

 

This job takes 15mm sockets or wrenches. My advice would to rotate the wheel enough to have the nut facing up from the engine compartment and facing down towards you in the cab. It's much easier to get ratchet with an extension to these bolts.

 

I had a 04, so I had no locking steering column or I didn't get the lock pin. Instead I rigged it... I took some packing tape and wrapped the steering to the gear lever column to insure the steering didn't move.

 

So far the new steering shaft works great. No noise! Although now I notice other creeks .

[95Sierra2500]

Sorry I didn't see this sooner. I could have given you the information that would have let you do it yourself. BTW, even the head of the bolt is a 15mm, it's just been modified to have the 'paddle' welded to it. It's like that so when the i-shaft is attached to the column, it only requires 1 wrench. They changed that for all models during the '08 model year, such that it now takes two 15mm wrenches.