| Power Steering on Ford 801? (Part 3) | ||
| 01/06/2011 - by Travis | ||
| It has been a while since I updated here. Progress has been made albeit slowly with the holidays and some technical hurdles.
Issue #1 - plumbing the hydraulics. I quickly found that the connectors on the cylinder are NOT JIC fittings. It seemed to be somewhere between a JIC 6 and JIC 8. Turns out it's a 45 degree automotive flare and SAE threads. I already had a JIC hose or else it probably would have been easiest to get a custom hose made. Instead, I decided to replace the flare connectors. It turns out those are a British pipe thread ORFS. That just means the BSP to JIC adapter was EXPENSIVE -- around $18 each. It probably would have been more economical to save my existing hose for a different project and have a new one made. Live and learn.  Connectors Issue #2 - I was trying to make the installation look nice and clean by using the existing tapered hole in a radius rod from a tractor with power steering. Well, the taper wasn't quite big enough to fit the pin from the rod end supplied with the kit. I figured a machine shop could remedy that. Machine shop #1 said they believed it was a nonstandard 6.25 degree taper rather than the standard 7.15 degree. Machine shop #2 said it appeared to be a standard 7.15 degree but that their carbide reamer couldn't cut the metal. That seems strange to me, but I know next to nothing about metal working. Anyway, this basically nixes that route. I can't waste any more money having machine shops try unsuccessfully So, the new plan is to cut down the included mount and weld this to the radius rod. So far, I have the mount cut down to a flat piece of metal. A test fit shows that it seems to fit nicely. I will add some pictures sometime soon. Update: 01/20/2011: it works! No pictures yet, but I had a bit of time to work on this over the weekend and was able to get to the proof-of-concept stage at least. Here is what I have done so far: I ended up cutting apart the mounting plate that came with the kit and welded the tab with the mounting hole to the radius rod. This seems to have worked quite well. My goal was really to minimize welding as much as possible to make installation easily repeatable. However, to have this welded professionally would probably cost less than $50 anyway. That's probably about what it would cost to ream out the radius rod holes. So, in the end, I don't think it really makes this kit that much more difficult to use. I didn't have all the hoses to connect to the priority valve, but I did do a test run off the tractor hydraulics using the power beyond kit. I'm not sure if my pump is a bit weak but the flow seemed to be on the low side for the power steering. It certainly worked, but seemed slightly slow. While waiting for the hoses from Surplus Center, I'm working on a simple bracket to mount the priority valve (3 GPM). That will be connected to the loader pump. Continued in Part 4 |