I wanted to post in here as a query/warning regarding the XM steering ram gaiter repair to the rear ram on an Activa. I tried talking to Jim about this while I was working on the car but found it very difficult to explain, hopefully this will make sense now Jim?
We followed Jim's guide mostly to the letter, only I had the rear wheels on ramps when we were doing the work instead of having the wheels dangling. One of the things we noticed was that by following Jim's instructions, the ram gaiter spigot would be under huge stress.
As you can see on the above shots, the spigot looks OK, however when the car is in service low (or on ramps in this case), the spigot gets bent quite severely by the subframe, which is fine when the spigot is nice and flexible, but give it a few years and it will harden up just like the original ram spigot does.
So what we did was undo the ram top nut, and managed to get the gaiter off in-situ (after already having the ram on the bench previously, the gaiter comes off much more easily the second time).
We put the XM ram gaiter on the opposite way around, and find that it sits much more reasonably, see below:
