Yee Haw!!! I finished rebuilding my steering gear box this past weekend, and I just now finished putting it back in the truck! How sweet it is not to have all that play in the wheel! My wife can't understand why this gets me so excited - I figured you all would understand!

 

Awright!

You rebuilt that thing yerself, congrats. One company charges $550 to rebuild 64 steering gears provided the sector shaft is good to go. What did it end up setting you back?



Keep 'er between the ditches.

 

Take a few minutes and tell us the entire story! Parts, problems, mistakes, short cuts and so on.
William in Atlanta

 

OK, hear it is:
It really wasn't as big a deal as I thought it was going to be - I'd been putting it off for years. I started with an old gear box that I scavenged from a yard ($90.00 ouch!). I was going to send it off to Auto Krafters (they said they could rebuid it for $375.00 if I had a good core to exchange) and then swap it out with the sloppy one in my truck. I was good to go when Auto Krafters said they didn't have any boxes that matched mine and that they would have to rebuild my unit which could get quite a bit more expensive depending on what they found. I didn't like the sound of that, so I decided to open it up and see what I could find. The toughest part of the whole job was removing the worm shaft bearing adjuster and its locking nut. I had to fabricate a big open end wrench to fit the lock nut. Lots of rust and grunge had made this an ugly mess. everything else broke loose easy as you please. The yard box had a damaged bearing and cracked bearing seat in the sector shaft housing cover that couldn't be seen from the outside and the sector shaft was badly rusted as a result of a bad bearing. The worm shaft and ball nut & ***** were just fine. I was bummbed about the crack in the housing cover (it was really unusable) and the bad sector, and was about to pull the box from my truck, when I saw another gear box an Ebay. I bought it for $24.00, and it arrived in excellent condition! To make a long story short, I was able to get one tight box out of the two I had on my bench and the one in the truck by swapping parts. I was able to make all of the adjustments and meet all tolerences as per my 1961 Ford Truck Shop Manual. I did have to adjust my column housing a bit because the worm shaft stuck out about 1/4" longer with the fresh parts installed, resulting in my horn not working and my turn signals not canceling. Once I slid the column up to 1/16" from the steering wheel hub everything was just great. I tell you though, I would not want to do this job without a hydraulic press - mine is a 20 ton, and a lathe.

 

 

I am rebuilding my gear box on a 64 f100. I have noticed garbz2 has very good advice on this subjest also. Could you guys give me the how to and tricks to rebuilding the gear box? THANKS