Jim Shea

I just uncovered this topic over at the Chevelle Tech website. A person over there had very long legs and moved his seat three inches rearward. This caused him to have to reach further for the steering wheel. He fixed the problem by installing a T&T head in place of his production tilt wheel head. The brought the steering wheel rearward an additional 2 inches (wheel retracted) and an additional 4 inches with the telescoping shaft extended. Since a GM T&T column is nothing more than a glorified tilt column, swapping parts between a tilt only column and a T&T is very possible.

My thought is the following. If you wanted additional reach to your steering wheel in a Corvette with a T&T steering column, couldn't you replace the entire upper head, telescoping shaft, turn signal switch, etc from a tilt column in another GM vehicle? This should move the steering wheel about an additional 2 inches toward the dash.

The only basic problem could be that moving the steering wheel forward (toward the dash) could result in the steering wheel hitting the instrument pad when it was in the full UP tilt position.

Since I do not have a C3 available to measure, I wonder if someone could ballpark determine if there seems to be clearance for the steering wheel rim in the full UP position.

You would also have to purchase the Corvette standard (non-adjustable) column steering wheel mounting hardware to be able to mount your Corvette steering wheel and horn parts on the tilt column head.

Note that the Corvette column changed to an advanced design in 1977 (i.e. dimmer on the column). Earlier columns (1969-1976) were "round" head columns. 1977 and later columns have a large bulge on the left side for the dimmer pivot mechanism. These two vintages of T&T columns do not interchange parts.

So you would have to replace "round" T&T column parts with "round" tilt column parts.

Just a thought,
Jim

imariver

In my 73 L-48, with the wheel in the up and forward position, there is about 4.250 from the dash to the wheel.