If the car has sat in a collection for a long time the grease in all the joints may be dried out, giving the car a bad case of memory steer. Once you are moving the steering should not be particularly heavy.
The rubber coupler in the steering column is there to keep you from getting speared by the steering column in a front end collision. A u-joint could work but you would have to re-engineer the angle between the upper and lower columns.
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