While rebuilding my 1954 manual steering box I ran into a few problems. I thought I would relay what I ended doing to over come these problems. I bought a steering box rebuild kit from ChevyDuty and it came with the gaskets, bushings, shims, bearings, and pitman shaft adjuster screw. The hardest part of rebuilding this steering box was the bushing replacement. The bushing removal from the main body of the box is easy, since you only need to drive it out with a bearing/bushing installation tool or an appropriate size deep socket. The bushing in the pitman shaft cover is difficult, since it is installed into pitman shaft cover and you cannot simply drive it out. If the bushing is of split design you can use a punch to collapse the bushing at the seem and then work it out with some plyers. I actually taped a roll of masking tape to the bottom of my jigsaw to limit its depth of cut into the cover and carefully cut through the bearing and then collapse/removed the bushing as stated above. The new bushing installed into the main body just fine, but the bushing for the pitman shaft cover looked like it hit something at the bottom of the bore and got deformed inward at the very bottom. I removed this bushing and discovered that there was a ridge at the bottom of the bore and the bushing that should have been installed in the cover should have been 1/4" shorter. The two bushings in the rebuild kit were the same size, so I never thought much about until I ran into this problem. When I removed the old bushing from the pitman cover I bent the crap out of it and when I finally got it out I just tossed it, so I never noticed it was a 1/4" shorter than the other one I removed. Luckily the other one I removed from the body of the box was still in good shape, so I reinstalled it in the Pitmanshaft cover till it bottom on the ridge 1/4" above the bottom of the bore. Then I cut the 1/4" inch sticking above the surface w/ a die grinder and then dressed the top edge w/ a file and sandpaper. The new bushings need to be reamed, so that the pitman shaft will fit into them. I thought this would be a piece of cake, since I had a set of reamers. Problem was the bushing needed to be reamed to 1-1/8" and my reamers only went up to 1-1/16". The second problem that you will encounter even if you do have the right size reamer for the job, is that you can't ream the bushing in the pitman shaft cover, since it is a blind hole and the reamer needs to be able to go completely through the hole being reamed. What I ended up doing instead of reaming the bushings is I used a brake cylinder hone attached to my drill to hone them into shape. After that I was home free and it all went back together nicely. Just wanted to give you folks a heads up just in case a steering box rebuild is in your future.
Jim
