[northern piper]

as you can imagine I did a ton of research after this happened and tried to warn everybody and their dog about how to install the inner tie rod right. I got a lot of people telling me to just buy a reman'd rack which comes with the inner tie rods already installed which I think is a lame answer. The reman'd ones from Ford or aftermarket are built differently. The OEM one on my van had the inners loctited and torqued, no locking pin. Replacement inner tie rods come with a locking pin (which after torquing the rod onto the rack gets driven into the threads for "locking" just to be perfectly clear here). I took the step of cleaning the rack end with solvent to remove any oil etc, applied red loctite, torqued the inner tie rod to spec, then drove the locking pin in. Over-kill? yes "me" kill ('cause the tie rod comes off the rack) no.