1975 Brutally Simple Daily Driver

[neohic]

I’m such an idiot. Yesterday I was wrapping everything up for the day thinking, “sure will be nice to finish up the front end in an hour or so!” Then this morning happened. I got into the shop, started throwing hardware at it, and it was great!

 

 

… and then, “hu… is that scratch new?”

 

 

It sure was! At full compression the pitman arm was crashing into the tie rod. Not much… but enough to bend the tie rod slightly while turning at full stuff. Then comes in the total idiot part when I thought I could get away with drilling a few new holes and move the steering box forward. 
 

 

Yup… I ended up needing to cut the crossmember, move the goofy shaped rear leg forward that fits fairly tight around the steering box, weld it all back together, add some new reinforcements, AND THEN I could drill some new holes to move the steering box forward.

 

 

I put a little extension on the back of the winch plate to tie in all of the steering box mount hardware while I was at it. It was missing one of the bolts towards the center this whole time too. The final result after an entire day in the shop?

 

 

… plenty of room between the pitman arm and the tie rod. 
 

Then I took it out of the shop to turn it around to get the shop ready for starting the rear. Sits pretty good.