Steering rack stripdown

[paulwitchard]

The pinion on the BX rack is leaking - it has been for about 3 years - but as its now dropping hydraulic fluid everywhere the time has come to do something about it.
As I have got a spare rack, and someone else is going to do the repairs (he possesses a ramp) I thought it might be easier if I put the pinion seal kit and new boots on the old one so that they could just be swapped over. The car is LHD so I think it should be much easier then a RHD car anyway.
Cleaned most of the crap off the outside of the replacement rack, got rid of the old gaiters, but I am wondering whether it might be as well to completely strip the rack to get rid of any grit or other muck that might have got past the scabby old gaiters. Question is how do you get the inner ball joint off so that the rack part can be pulled through the other end? They must be removable as they are sold separately - http://www.ebay.fr/itm/Citroen-BX11-14- ... 2572d8187c" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; - Mr Haynes manual runs to plenty of pages but no useful information on this particular point.
Before I go rummaging through my fine selection of hammers has anyone got any useful information - even if its only 'clean off what you can and leave well alone'.

[BX Bandit]

Personally I wouldn't bother but if you really want to the either a special tool or use stilsons for the brute force approach, or fabricate a tool to tighten around the larger diameter part of the ball joint

[citsncycles]

what's the state of the ball joints? Timex needed both inner joints, both boots and the pinion was leaking - when I totted up the cost of rebuilding it, I managed to find a complete recon rack (with no exchange needed) for the price of the parts needed to rebuild the old one.

[paulwitchard]

The inner ball joints seem fine, so I decided to leave well alone, so far I have managed to wrestle the new boots on to it (the LR bonnet is just the right height for this!), the next job is to replace the O rings in the pinion.

[Discoil]

Strange you are contemplating the steering job as we have just had a reconditioned pinion fitted today to stop a major leak ( well it looks like that on a wet day )
Back end of the estate is usually on its knees in a short time but was still up after 3 hours.