During Tom Wilson’s test drive last week we found a few more things he wanted me to look at before loading it on a truck for Los Angeles, and one of them was the turn signal return mechanism. Tom’s turn signals were working fine, but they weren’t cancelling after the turn was completed like most cars.

In my mind’s eye, I knew what was missing so I had to pull apart my steering wheel and turn signal assembly to gain access to the part. My car has been very handy when fixing all these GTEs, but sometimes I feel badly that she has to spill get guts for the betterment of others all the time.

There’s a clip that mounts to the steering shaft that was missing on the white GTE, so I had to remove it from my car to make a copy.

As simple as this piece was, it was made from one piece of steel, so I tried a number of ways to fabricate it. Luckily, I had a steering shaft out of the blue GTE that I could use to form the steel into shape.

I ended up welding the clip together to close up my fabricated part. I hope it works as well as the original one!

The slot in the piece allows a clip to slide on the securing screw and adjust the way the turn signal cancels.

Here’s a video showing the newly installed clip doing its job. Don’t mind the squeaking. That’s the noise of the new rubber firewall grommet on the steering shaft. It’s a lot quieter when the car is on the ground and you can’t twirl the steering wheel as fast as I did in this video. I also shot some lube on the grommet after I saw the post!