On Saturday I got the chance to reverse a Corvair steering box over at my good buddy El Rio Roach’s shop/garage. We were using the instructions that California Custom Roadsters put out 30 years ago and it seemed simple enough. So we thought.

When I first got the Corvair box it looked like a cow chip with a Pitman arm. After copious amounts of penetrating oil and wire brushing it went from a lawn sculpture to a nice aluminum steering box. Literally, all of the caked on grease and dirt from 30+ years made it look hellish, but it is sweet now.

The first thing we did was remove the screw on retaining ring with a brass drift, use a steel one if you want to screw it up dummy. Then we unscrewed the top cover of the box to reveal the guts inside. I took the top and tapped a guide in the center of the cap, still when we put it on the drill press the hole was a tad off center. This really was not a problem since you make your hole with a 5/8” drill bit ultimately (drill a small pilot hole first), and the instructions tell you to go oversize on the hole. So, we hogged it out a little bit and it went on slick on a test fit of the shaft.

The directions are pretty straightforward which should have warned us that something funky would happen. According to the directions, you just flip the worm and sector gear and pop it back together. Not so, it took some finesse to get the end of the worm gear to seat well on the bearings AND line up with the first tooth of the gear on the Pitman arm shaft. As you look at the box from the top with the Pitman shaft on your left, lower the sector gear onto the first tooth of the Pitman shaft cog. Remember, you should see all of the teeth for both cogs and the first tooth of the sector gear should be on top of the first tooth of the Pitman cog, dig? It really did take some time and finagling and frustration to get it right, but we did.

There is a seal that surrounds the outer shaft that goes to the steering column. We removed this seal so we could put a freeze plug in the hole the top of the shaft used to go through. CCR’s instructions don’t say anything about removing this seal, but you have to in order to install the 15/16” freeze plug. Don’t bother with the parts bins where you buy your wax and fuzzy dice, they asked me what kit that was in and for what engine. I should have known, but they were closer. So, I went to NAPA and got one of what I needed and got out spending a mere $1.07 to finish the job professionally. I took a dead blow hammer and knocked that plug home leaving a tad above the rim for clearance as instructed. We could not convince the Pitman arm to come off no matter what we did with the cheapy puller we had, well, off to the machine shop for that. Better to spend a little cash to have someone with the appropriate tool do the job.