REPLACING THE STEERING BOX

07 Since we are upgrading the steering box and we have a new pitman arm, we decided to leave the arm connected to the factory gear box and remove them together.

08 First, we disconnected the worn-out rag joint coupler and the lines at the power steering pump on the engine.

09 Next, we removed the hardware inside the frame rail.

12 Before installing the new gear box, we installed the new rag joint coupler to the output shaft. The splines on the output shaft and the coupler are a perfect fit. We also installed the new pitman arm.

15 New power steering lines were used to hook up the steering gear box to a new power steering pump that we installed way back when we freshened up the small-block 350 V-8.

10 The sloppy old gear box was extracted and tossed on the scrap pile.

13 Swapping in the new 500 series steering gear box required no modifications or special brackets. It simply bolted to the frame rail just like stock.

16 The lines on the pump were a tight squeeze, but it was a relatively simple job because the new steering box had the same port sizes and threads as the factory box. No special lines were needed for the swap.

11 We thought it would be a good idea to clean up some of the sludge left behind by leaking fluids. A wire wheel and some rattle can paint did the trick.

14 While the truck was disassembled, we cleaned up some of the parts that we would reuse, like the steering column shaft. Then we painted it, reinstalled it and connected it to the new rag joint coupler.

17 Since we opted for the inline filter, we simply cut out a section of the lowpressure return line and installed the filter, paying attention to the direction of flow as labeled.