Just to follow up for anyone who is interested...I took the drawing Joe H posted and printed it out. I drew an arc for the pitman arm travel, and selected two points on that arc to represent places I could move the pitman arm to by moving it one spline at a time. One of these positions is almost straight down (rather than angled back at the 5:00 position which is stock), and another angled forward (7:00) which ends up directly underneath the spring hanger.
My original curiosity was to see if locating it directly below the spring hanger would improve the drag link's travel arc (bump steer) to get it closer to the leaf spring travel arc.
It turns out neither of these pitman arm locations would improve the drag link travel arc. They may even make it slightly worse.
This of course depends on how close to scale the drawing is. I did attempt to check the scale on the drawing by measuring both the length of the actual pitman arm and drag link , as well as the length of each of them on the picture, and comparing the ratios. It's close, but not exact, so I can't say the drawing is perfectly to scale, but I think it's close enough to draw the conclusion that different pitman arm positions and drag link lengths will not improve anything with the steering box in the stock location. So to answer my own original question, I think Chevy chose this particular pitman arm location and drag link length as the best compromise between bump steer and consistency of how quickly the wheels turn left and right.
Ron
Last edited by RBs36; 01/31/2025 1:17 AM.
