Hi Everyone, Steven's the name, I am new to the forums. I have a question regarding the steering box. I just picked up a 91 f150 straight 6 4.9l 4x4. She wasn't very well taken care of so im in the midst of fixing her up. I noticed right away it needed an alignment, the passanger front tire was pretty bald on the inside. so the first thing i did was take it down to get tires and an alignment. The shop told my they could not do the alignment for several reasons. I took the truck back home and started fixing the problems they wanted fixed. No way i was paying 97 bucks an hour for them to fix something I am capable of doing. SO. i replaced all 4 ball joints, and front wheel bearings. but they also told me the steering box was loose. I crawled underneath to have a look since I had almost everything disconnected anyways, (tie rod ends, ball joints etc) I grabbed onto the pitman arm and there seems to be no play in there what so ever. I can move the pitman arm and i can see the input right away on the steering column side telling the gears are ok. (I'm assuming). now on the drive home after i first bought it, you could tell there was a bit of play in the steering wheel. should i replace the gearbox anyways or is there something else i should be checking out?

Thanks everyone, many more posts to come! she has a lot of problems i intend on fixing up!

Cheers

Steven

 

Oh guess I should have searched the forums before I go posting away. Seems like this is a fairly common issue. I go through all the other posts about steering wheel play etc. and see if i can come up with a fix for my truck.

 

Good luck!

 

i have an 89 with a 5.0 but i think the steering boxes that were used were the same for a while, there is a bolt with a locking nut right on top of the steering box, right up next to the radiator, you can loosen up the locking nut(probably going to need to use pb blaster or wd40 cause dirt/road grime likes to land on top) and use a flat tip screwdriver to tighten the adjuster bolt and then tighten the locking nut while holding the adjuster bolt. only do a 1/4 of a turn because it doesn't take much to adjust it a lot, and drive it a little and see if its better, and if you think if can go more than do it again and drive it again. that's really the only advice i have, but that should take away a lot of the looseness in the steering don't replace it until you try this cause this will save you a bunch of money, cause steering boxes aren't cheap and every ford pickup truck in our generations that i have driven has had loose steering, good luck