So as some of you are aware I am working hard to shake this rig down before the upcoming event and the steering appears to be the last major issue that I need to address.
I will post more pictures later but there’s really two things that I need to do;
1) replace all of the tire rods because there are knackered. They should be straightforward because everything is available and tie rods are basically tie rods, so not real worried about that.
2) Address the scary Pitman arm set up that I didn’t realize was a giant safety risk. I didn’t realize how loose my Pitman arm connection was and I had a scary steering wobble develop when I was doing some testing and I discovered that this connection was ready to come undone. As you can see from the picture below if there is a ton of slack in the system and it is so badly matched that there’s no tapered fit, so it’s impossible to snug down the connection. You can see that I added some spacers and a cotter pin so it at least was not going to come a part of me when I was moving it but obviously I cannot run it like this and it needs to be addressed.
It looks like BTB makes a pitman arm that addresses this but I know people have had success doing a number of other approaches. This rig has a reverse shackle lift on it with about a 3 inch pipe, so I do need something that has a pretty good drop to it. The current arm locates at the right height it’s just the taper is wrong.
I suppose if everything else fails I could sleeve this or weld it and re-drill but that doesn’t seem like the most elegant approach.
Thanks again for all the help!
I will post more pictures later but there’s really two things that I need to do;
1) replace all of the tire rods because there are knackered. They should be straightforward because everything is available and tie rods are basically tie rods, so not real worried about that.
2) Address the scary Pitman arm set up that I didn’t realize was a giant safety risk. I didn’t realize how loose my Pitman arm connection was and I had a scary steering wobble develop when I was doing some testing and I discovered that this connection was ready to come undone. As you can see from the picture below if there is a ton of slack in the system and it is so badly matched that there’s no tapered fit, so it’s impossible to snug down the connection. You can see that I added some spacers and a cotter pin so it at least was not going to come a part of me when I was moving it but obviously I cannot run it like this and it needs to be addressed.
It looks like BTB makes a pitman arm that addresses this but I know people have had success doing a number of other approaches. This rig has a reverse shackle lift on it with about a 3 inch pipe, so I do need something that has a pretty good drop to it. The current arm locates at the right height it’s just the taper is wrong.
I suppose if everything else fails I could sleeve this or weld it and re-drill but that doesn’t seem like the most elegant approach.
Thanks again for all the help!
