65 Power Steering Conversion Done My Way

[JGross]

You will note that I didn’t title this thread “Power Steering Conversion Done The Right Way” because I don’t know the “Right Way”.

My goal is the have the steering have equal travel in both directions when I done and I don’t want to do this by mismatching the length of the tie rods. This means that I’ll have to modify the length of the drag length by cutting and welding. This doesn’t concern me but more about that later.

When I got the truck the crossmember had already been replaced with one form a 73 C10 so I decided to stay with 73 parts, so I got a 73 power steering box and pitman from the local parts store and an adapter plate from CaptinFab.



I install the gear box by using the lower aft hole from the original gear box, In this pic you can see the four bolts that hold the gear box on, note that I had to get an allen head bolt for the lower forward hole because it was so close to the bottom of the frame.




To set the location of the other three holes I used an angle gage to ensure that the angle of the pitman arm was the same as the idler arm.




I welded up the adapter plate to the frame and mounted the gear box and pitman arm. When I was done I checked the geometry of the drag link.





As you can seed the drag link was now 5/8" low on the drivers side and the pitman arm and idler arm was out of parallel by 1/4".

So now it was time to move the idler arm



I leveled the truck then used the C clamp to hold the idler arm in place while I leveled the drag link. I also made sure that it was parallel to the crossmember

[JGross]

Then I drilled new holes in the frame and mounted the idler arm. There are several hole now in the frame very close together near the lower bolt on the idler arm so I will weld the backing plant in place when I done.



Now I made sure that the steering box was in the center of it's travel.



Then I bottomed out the tie rods so that I was sure they were the same length, this should have meant that both front tires had excessive toe in. The drivers side did have alot of toe in but the passengers side was almost straight. To check their alignment I measured for the bump stop tab on the spindle to the center of the lower shock bracket.



I found that there was a 1/2" difference and I needed to move the front of the passengers side tire in 1/2". To do this I decided I would have to take 1/2" out of center of the drag link. However if I did that the pitman arm and the idler are would now be out of parallel by 3/4". So I looked at the Idler arm and realized that it could be swamped around and then when the drag link was shortened it would move back into parallel.

Before


After


I'm waiting on the correct weld wire to arive and when it does I'll make the mods to the drag link. More Then

[onequickchevy]

Cool, curious to see how this all works out. Mine sucks turning right now!