Posted by Gary on Sunday, December 30, 2001 at 10:29AM :
In Reply to: Pwr Str Kit for 61-71 Sweptline PW posted by Mark on Sunday, December 30, 2001 at 2:19AM :
This conversion kit looks like a piece of first class work and the price for the whole kit ($575.00 or they also offer partial kits for less $) with a reconditioned power steering gear is very reasonable. A 30 to 40 year old complete original Dodge power assist set up will cost in the neighborhood of $150.00 to $300.00 and still need reconditioning, plus your old steering gear may still need to be rebuilt. Another advantage of converting to this type of set up is the amount of turns lock to lock required to steer the truck. The original manual steering gear takes about six complete turns of the wheel lock to lock, the Ford power steering gear that this kit utilizes is probably only about three to four turns lock to lock. The quicker steering gear ratio will compress the amount steering wheel slop that is caused by worn steering components. The steering wheel will have much less back and fourth slop even though no other work has been done freshen up the front end. I did a similar (Ford Gear) conversion on my 68W100 some years ago with excellent results, I wish this kit would have been available then it would have saved me a lot of fabrication work.