Wow, that's really quite easy. I have been into two of these columns now, but they were taken apart completely.
My car was quite bad considering the low mileage, so I bought a new tilt base (took the column out of the car). the base is still available, but not the tilt housing. The oversize pins can correct the play in either. what I did was hand select the pins that I had on hand (the new tilt base came with two more) and then swaged some .003" copper foil used for winding transformers to bush up the tilt housing hole.
I would have preferred to do it the way you did though. In my case i really did need the base pretty badly, but i don't think there are too many good tilt housings that couldn't benefit from a fatter pin.
question/comment:
-$50 is not too much to custom fit to eliminate this problem and avoid column disassembly.
-Can you get the pins with wider inner or outer dimensions (but not both)?
