Our car came with a Quaife manual quick steering rack which is all well and good except that it has a really high steering effort. It is really hard just moving the car around in the shop, you can feel the steering wheel flexing from all the effort! To help with this our car came with a big weird feeling bus-like steering wheel. To make the car easier to drive at low speeds while not wanting to get rid of the fast Quaife steering rack or clutter up the front of the engine with pumps, belts, and pulleys, we decided to give an electric power steering system from epowersteering.com a chance.
We haven’t liked electric power steering in the past, having overheating issues in our time attack Evo X, in Dai Yoshihara’s AE86 and his drift car. However, our car is small, light, and has small tires. This will not load the power steering system as much. Also, the power steering system uses an OEM Toyota Prius assist motor unlike the smaller UTV assist motors found in other brands. We figure our AE86 is much lighter than a Prius and having an OEM quality motor might make the system work better.
The epowersteering system also has a controller box with figures out the assist level from the motor’s torque sensor and is adjustable for different levels of assist by turning a knob. We have a friend using a Prius steering motor in his track-driven Integra and he loves it. We have another friend who competes in the Optima Challenge using one of these kits and he loves it too so hopefully ours will work well!
Stay tuned, we will have many more cool parts going into our AE86.
Sources
Techno Toy Tuning
Whiteline
ePowersteering.com
8 comments
Kakkoii!!!
Speaking of electric power steering, why the EPS in many cars, even some performance cars are so numb? Some even feel like there’s excessive friction in the system that further muddy the steering feedback.
Not sure, you don’t have the torsion bar so it’s more direct.
Really is cool that T3 is doing what they’re doing to support a lot of old weird cars. 1st gen RX-7 lover here, which has much of the same design as the AE86, suspension-wise… actually an FB with a lot of T3 parts podiumed in E Production at the SCCA Runoffs a couple weekends ago, which is a nice testament to their stuff.
Does the AE86 do the same thing the FB does with unequal length rear links or did they do a better job there? Also be curious to see, given the opportunity to change things afforded by parts, where you’re choosing to put the instant centers in practice.
It has some different problems like a ton of roll steer and a crazy amount of anti squat so the car hops like basketballs even with the puny 4AG power.
God save us from OEMs with anti geometry.
Let’s hope for some regular updates.
Love the project and the updates! Im subbed on this for sure