The latest and greatest on a crew cab short bed 2500 I bought to use as a plow truck/winter beater/sacrificial anode.
I got the reman steering box in yesterday and it works and doesn't leak, but is too tight. I first tried backing down the over center nut 45 degrees, but that didn't do the trick. Going to need to back off the bearing preload some, but I'll probably not tighten the over center any more as I could feel it drag through the center of the travel. When I put the box in I couldn't turn the input by hand, so I was expecting this. The good news is that the box itself isn't a sloppy mess. The Pitman that came with the truck was pretty new so I pumped a bunch of Lucas grease through it until only red came out and wiped it down. It looks like a Moog arm. Paranoid of blowing seals out again I jacked the wheels up off the ground and turned it back and forth to bleed. The growl never totally went away, probably needs a pump to be totally quiet, thing was run bone dry for God only knows how long, but it works so it can wait. I then set about getting the toe dialed in by eyeball first. Even after the knuckle and ball joint toe was still WAY out.
It doesn't look nearly as terrible as it was jacked up because the tires toe in with droop. I zeroed it by eyeball and went for a quick rip. It pulled HARD to the right, I had to hold the wheel cocked 45 degrees to the left to get it down the road. Came back and it was still out by the eyecrometer after everything had settled so I set it with toe plates this time and moved the truck back and forth to get a true reading after the changes. Now it pulled lower case hard to the right, took half or so of that 45 degrees to go straight down the road. I could get it less bad by fudging the alignment with some cross camber/caster, but the problem became more apparent after zeroing the toe and verifying wheel placement in the wells.
I already knew this was a thing, but I had to see the damage with toe set properly. Yep, that's not good.
So after driving and verifying the truck was still somehow hosed, I took another gander at the frame rails. How did I not see this before? Seems pretty obvious now, but I'm not sure that what I saw will come through in the pics. Good (less bad?) side.
Lots of crap in the way, but look at the curvature of the frame here behind the UCA mounts. And compare that to this.
Easier to see here, that bend is pinched. Makes sense, this sort of bend area is exactly what would give in an impact. Gonna have to call the frame shop and see how good the truck needs to be to get pulled and how good they would need to make it to put their seal of approval on it. Because I'm really not in the mood to replace all the hammered bushings and crap in the front end to get a perfect alignment out of the thing, I have many other fish to fry with this first. Here's more evidence of the bent frame.
I was already tracking this, but without seeing the bend in the frame wasn't quite sure what to chalk it up to. This gem also caught my eye.
Somehow that tie rod didn't catch my attention when I swapped the knuckle. The tie rod ends were damn near bottomed out against one another to get toe where it needs to be. Swapping this out should give some breathing room. Notice that it, like the ball joint and steering box, was pretty new? Why couldn't they break old crap? Here's a shot of the whole thing.
