I typed up a lengthy reply but F-it.

Leave my choice of air freshener out of this.

Good luck with your project.

 

I'm not sure of fully understanding the mod without a picture, but the theory seems wrong. The purpose of the u-joint is to keep the same rotational speed on both sides of the joint, this means that the same torque is available at both sides, moving upwards of downwards the location of the u-joint doesn't modify the torque transmitted at all.

I'd say that what is actually happening is that the shaft has an added tension at some point due to the relative shafts/u-joint geometry being forced out of its physical limits, and this can be caused because the long shaft that goes to the steering wheel is being pushed against the firewall gasket and/or the torque sensor shaft is being pulled upwards, creating added friction, due to the fact that now the sum of lenghts of both shafts is different.

This is something easily reproducible when installing the famous steering rack spacers and not loosening the u-joint bolt to allow the shafts to slack a little bit to the new relative angle. I did it (wrongly) and the steering feel was charming, but it was pretty obvious that something was too tight. The effect is similar if you tigthen too much the rack guide.

I'm more prone to believe that the way to solve the steering weight feel is the EPS programming, but that is an impossible route to play with.