2018 L6 Jakes Long travel issue

[trmartin]

This has stumped me for months. I have been dealing with a guy there who is just as stumped asi have been.

A little background on me. I own 10 carts and have been building/buying/selling carts for 15yrs and I’ve never had my rear ending handed to me like I have on this cart. I bought a brand new 18’ L6 gas to replace my 16’ L6 gas that I recently sold. I wanted to install a LT on this on since it’s a pavement pounder at my beach house in Hatteras NC. Ordered a LT from Jakes. They didn’t have a listing for it so I called technical service and they said they had one to fit it. So I put it on my lift gate go off the front end and install the new long travel kit. First thing on the 18 model the hubs wouldn’t fit. No problem, I’ve got more hubs from an older TXT. Installed those problem fixed. Once I installed the kit aligned the front end and took it for a spin it would not steer. It was super tight. So, they sent me a new steering box. Install that same problem. They sent another steering box, and The same problem was still there. Nothing is binding. Last week, I removed the steering box once again and found what I thought the issue was. What I found was the steering shaft with nothing attached to it was tighter than normal. So I removed the whole column, then took the rubber seal / bushing out from the top of the column and found that it was tight causing the steering to be tight. I bored out the inside a few thousands and was able to have 1 finger steering w/out the box hooked up. Thought that was the problem, I was wrong. Once box was hooked up it was hard to steer. Box on the bench with another new steering shaft was free. Long story short was the we came to the conclusion that the angle of the steering shaft was the issue. Tonight I have mostly fixed it, but not the correct way. I ended up removing the aluminum plate that spaces out the steering box from the mount, then installed 6 washers on the top bolt allowing the box to lean back. Wow, what a difference. This should not be the way to remedy the super tight steering issue but it seems to have fixed it. It was at the point my wife couldn’t steer it.

Has anyone else ever had this problem? I bought this lift in July of 18’ and has been a real pain since. Multiple hrs on the phone with Jakes, and no one seemed to know why. I was at the point of taking the cart to them and let them figure it out.

So, it looks like 6 .10cent washers was the problem????