General Ford Flex Discussions • Re: Seperating upper/lower steering shaft?

Done deal. The lower half of the 2009/2010 shaft does easily swap over onto a 2011/2012 upper shaft/column. As mentioned above, the male portion of the lower shaft is an inch shorter, but there is still plenty of overlap. Everything else is identical and in my case, doing it this way saved me over $1500 for the part alone.

The column is held in with two studs and two bolts that are easily visible once you have the lower trim off on the bottom half of the column/dash. There are 5-6 wire harnesses to disconnect that are easily visible once the lower trim is off the column. NOTE: there is one more harness that connects onto the back upper half of the column that you cannot see or get at until the column is dropped. Pretty sure this is an airbag connector since it had a yellow safety clip on it.

There is a boot clamp to remove on the inside of the firewall that connects the column boot to a firewall boot - leave it on the lower firewall boot if you can (just pinch the clamp and pull out the column boot) as it will be next to impossible to get back on since there are rubber fins that stick through slots on the clamp. If you are using a rebuilt column like I was, open up the slit on the U-joint before installing so it will slide on nicely. I found it easier to install the lower shaft onto the steering rack by itself, then slide the upper shaft/column onto the lower shaft. If you try to do it all at once, it's awkward to wrestle with the weight/angles of the whole column while trying to fit the U-joint in place.

Here's the two lower shafts side by side for comparison:
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