Steering column help... to tilt or not to tilt?

[Trip59]

Ok, so I get the truck, it has a van tilt crammed into the dash. At the time it was an automatic with column shift.

I buy a floor shift manual trans non-tilting column in really good shape from a board member. Take it apart, clean it up, and in the process drop the rear aluminum cover/cone piece...

So I hammer it back into shape (with a wood dowel, relax) and get the column back together today, put it in and...



pulled so far it's jammed into the dash and it's STILL short enough that the shaft comes out trying to get it into the joint.

The gearbox is manual, from the rag joint to the point in the knuckle where the column shaft goes is about 13" Is it the wrong lower shaft? Did someone crush it?

So I'm looking at this all, and while I like the simplicity of the non-tilt column, the tilt is a nice feature... I'm thinking about maybe rebuilding it and using it (else I'll be selling it here soon) but the turn signal component is missing a few things. It looks the same as the one from the other column, would they swap over?

What would you do? Here's the tilt in the dash, so it seems the lower column is too short to begin with, but that tilt sticks waaay out into the cab.



Trip