gm steering column

i have a 74 monte carlo tilt column tha i plan to shorten and use in my street rod. it looks easy enough, but how do get rid of the lever at the end and still be able to remove the key

Look for posts by Don Shillady on this forum He went thru this exact thing. I think that you manually turn the tab at the end of the column into what would correspond with the "neutral" position which will let your key turn all the way to start your car,but should not engage the steering wheel lock, then cut it off flush with the column casing and weld it to the casing so that it can't inadvertanyly turn afterwards-----it would be mega bad news if you were driving down the road and it vibrated around to the "lock steering wheel" position. I tried to disassemble a G.M. tilt column with a shifter mounted on it, thinking that perhaps I could remove the shifter arm and rotate the sleeve so that the hole in it for the shifter arm would be at the bottom, not noticable.-----big mistake-----I ended up with a big damn mess. Ended up buying a tilt column from Ididit for about a zillion dollars and installing it in my roadster pickup instead.---Very nice unit, but rich, very rich.

As Brian said, but I haven't actually done it yet, I only looked at the setup John York uses on the Cobras he builds, but I have rebuilt and painted a Camaro column and intend to do this trick since John York said it is easy to do and he uses such columns in Cobra turnkey cars. He assures me he can set it up for me when I farm out the steering links to him. Stuff like brakes and steering are very important so when I get the body on the frame I am going to take it over to York's shop about 1/2 mile from my home. If you can find my old threads there are good comments by other folks. I think around December of '04 there were as many as four threads going on discussing this situation.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder

thanks i was hoping i could just lock it in nuetral some how