Well the steering rebuild has been coming along, but slow. I found out the steering box needs to be rebuilt and after doing some research I decided to ship it out to a guy in Missouri and have him rebuild. Actually, remanufacture. He is going to take it all apart…hone, polish and replace any parts that need to be with original or OEM parts. Here is a picture of the old steering box and power steering pump, that is all being rebuilt.

Ok…..these parts don’t look too bad…………BUT….the steering fluid was black…goes in red and something was leaking, not sure if it was the pump (lower pic) or the gear box (upper pic). Also, I am getting the steering box upgraded to be a faster ratio. What this means is that instead of 4 1/2 turn lock to lock it will be 3 1/2. Does not sound like much, it makes a difference. Couple weeks. This is kind off expensive, but its a upgrade I wanted to do.

Ok…I have got the parts back and they look great……take a look!

Factory colors…and all. These ARE the same parts. Ok, this is what was done. Each parts is taken apart, cleaned and all surfaces inside and out are stripped done to the bare metal and and seals, bearings that are bad or leaking are replaced. As I mentioned the steering box (left) was changed to a 3 1/2 turn. Meaning, instead of 4 1/2 turns to go from lock to lock it will only take 3 1/2. This also means that the steering will be more like modern trucks of today….well at least thru the 90’s. In the case of the steering pump, also stripped and all dents are worked out and the internals are redone and pressure tested. So there should be no leaks. Hopefully I will be installing this week. These should be like new inside and out. What I like about all this…is that these are my original parts. Bad news is the steering box is a 1972, so its not original to the truck. But, you can’t tell other than the date code on the box. Must have been replaced by the previous owner.

Link to the company that did the work: http://www.powersteering.com

Have done a little in the last few weeks – work has kept me very busy. I have prepared the frame for putting in the power steering box I have some pics of what I did to the frame and the primer.

I will be putting on the box and pump in real soon. I also have trial fitted my new steering wheel to the new tilt steering column. All is good, I was able to get the indicator lined up perfectly. I will show you what I did to get that done. I am writing up a post seperate for that, which I will be putting on a National blog also so others can see how I did it. I saw a whole bunch of other trying to get new shifter linkage done up right and having questions. So, I will be putting what I did in a post of that site so I can help them out.

The Steering wheel is a reproduction of a ’69 Camaro steering wheel, which I like. Original 69 Camaro wheels are astronomical in price. So repro will do. I think it looks better than the original truck wheel and is 1 inch smaller in Diameter-16 inches instead of 17 inches. Same as the wheel in my Dakota, so it feels familiar.

Originals are hard to come by in good shape, hard to fix and the reproductions are terrible. Plus its kinda plain and not sporty. But, some like it.

More to come…….