Well the weather forecast finally stopped looking like a cloud with sleet coming out of it.. so after overextending myself with long bicycle rides in the sunshine, I decided to go ahead and further bend, stretch, twist, spindle and otherwise mutilate my body that's not used to doing all that after a cold winter of being pretty sedentary.
While doing so, I cracked open the steering box on my C60, and I'm pretty sure this was its first time seeing daylight inside since 1965. 59 year old GM steering grease looks a lot like mustard! But the parts were all still good enough to reuse, except for the new seals I installed. My neighbor was nice enough to lend me some white teflon sealant for the threads, so they won't leak either. And after a lovely trip to Tractor Supply in Puyallup, I had the quart of Super S 00 grease. The box took the whole quart, almost exactly, but it does feel a little better now and the preload over center even wound up being pretty correct once the bearings were tight and lubed with modern day goop. It took a couple of tries to stick the worm shaft into the lower bearing and have it stay put till I could get the cap on and threaded in without that lower bearing going crooked and having to take it apart again and fix it.
I think I preserved the relationship correctly between the two gears, because the box still has its full 6-3/4 turn of travel end to end, overcenter happens right at 3-3/8 turns, and the pitman arm/steering linkage arrangement is in the position it was when assembled before. I assume that if I had the gears wrong, there would be a turning radius issue as in the pitman arm would go really far one way and not far enough the other way depending on which way the gear teeth were misassembled.
After all that, I had to do some exhaust work on a friend's car the next day. So today I'm really stiff and sore!!
