Tie rod replacement hint

[Spudgunner]

I put a nice 90-degree bend in my driver's side rear tie rod yesterday. I had an old "emergency" tie rod that is/was a scabby-welded piece of junk (long story), so I decided to replace the bent tie rod with that until a new part shows-up later this week. Anyway, removing the tie rod linkage at the knuckle (outboard) connection was easy; however, the inboard connection to the steering system hydraulic shaft was challenging as there was no way to grab said hyd shaft to keep it from rotating while trying to unscrew the bent tie rod from it. The Service Manual noted that a "machined area on the hyd shaft" might aid in tie rod removal. There was no "machined area" on the driver's side.
To cut to the chase...this mysterious helpful "machined area" is composed of two "flats" on the hyd shaft BUT THE FLATS ARE ONLY ON THE PASSENGER SIDE. An open-end 1-3/16 (30mm) or adjustable wrench works great for spanning the flats that are milled into the steering gear hyd shaft. Once the wrench was in place, everything came apart easily.

Hopefully, this might help somebody. I can attest that the TC tie rod ends are a bit flimsy; however, they may be acting as a "mechanical fuse" to protect the main ($$$) steering gear.

 

[s2dm]

I have this same issue and am not spotting flats on either side. We decided to try holding from the non broken side tie rod joint and the hydraulic shaft seems to be two parts, we were able to slowly partially unscrew and then rescrew it tight again. Not really sure what to do from here, but damn if we dont use our tool cat for just about everything on our farm despite having a lot of other equipment. Its become indespendisble