Finally decided to tackle a squeaking noise I heard when I turned the steering wheel - something between squeaking and creaking. For weeks I assumed it was some plastic rubbing around the column and ignored it.
Eventually I had enough and decided to investigate further. Pretty quickly I narrowed it down to the rag joint, with the body lift aluminum spacer in it :
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I noticed that if I loosened the two through bolts holding the joint together, the noise went away. But I couldn't figure out why. Finally I took out the entire assembly, both sides of the rag joint and the aluminum spacer. It was still hard to find a cause, but eventually I did - the machined counterbore in the aluminum block (for the two steel pins in the lower half of the rag joint) was not deep enough, so the tips of the pins rubbed against the bottom of the counterbore as the steering rotated and the pins tilted back and forth.
I fixed this by simply drilling through the counterbores to create through holes for the pins, which made the noise go away. The body lift kit supplier said he never had this issue before, which I find hard to believe.
Nice to have quiet steering again.
. I just wish I didn't have to. Almost makes me want to add a body lift kit to the Spiker lineup 
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