well my rambler workings have crawled to a near, but not quite, halt. i'm thinking of it as a long vacation. i did finally get the "new" steering box assembled for the 63 American. was an easy rebuild (though it took me 6 months). the only complication was, it had been rebuilt some time in the past, and instead of pressing in a new bronze bushing, someone bored out the casting and inserted a plain steel bushing. did a good job, but it confounded bushing replacement. my solution was to chuck the now-worn steel bush and bore it out to accept the stock bronze bush. let's be kind and say these are not performance steering boxes. it's sloppy as designed. simple plain bushings for the output shaft. odd, because it has adjustable (shimmed) taper rollers on the input shaft. i considered machining it all for needle rollers but ugh, too much work. it would be a tough thing to swap in any replacement. the box is very tiny, about the size of a big fist -- seriously. given the odd geometry it would be easier to put in import rack and pinion. that would be a better route, as it's 6 turns lock to lock! that's 24:1. So it made sure it's not gonna leak and filled the box with 15w50 synth motor oil, and not grease or whatever it wanted originally. the bearings showed some wear, but it was relatively minor, no grit or run-dry damage, so back together it went for another 50 years (if we should be so arrogant). so now i have a fully rebuilt cross-linkage and box, i hope to get those both installed this fall, plus the anti-roll bar. then the front suspension will be very tight and rally-able. the rear suspension is awful, but works surprisingly well. that should be a lot easier to fixup. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://list.amc-list.com/pipermail/amc-list-amc-list.com/attachments/20110809/0b80eb55/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ AMC-list mailing list AMC-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://list.amc-list.com/listinfo.cgi/amc-list-amc-list.com