After what seemed like forever, I buttoned up the rebuilding of my front suspension and steering on the 'Cuda. Still need to add a couple grease fittings and find one bolt and nut for the front sway bar bracket, but other wise it's done. (I hope) After cleaning 46 years of grease and grim off the parts they were all wire wheeled and repainted. As partially stated in my last post, I installed new upper and lower ball joints, new lower control arm bushings (major PIA to replace), new tie rod ends and adjusting sleeves, new idler arm, new 16.1 ratio steering box, new wheel bearings and grease seals, new caliber slide pins, new oversize front strut rods from Mancini Racing after discovering (after cleaning of course) that one of the original OEM rods was bent, rebuilt brake calibers, new brake pads, new brake hoses, new sway bar bushings, new cam alignment bolts, and new upper and lower control arm stops. I'm sure I've forgotten a few things but that pretty much sums it up. I wanted to get it done so I can mount the engine and transmission to the K member and install in the car after it gets back from the machine shop later this month.
I also installed new NOS (bought by previous owner in about 1983 and never installed) rear wheel well moldings. For NOS parts, they sure did a lousy job of bending them to the proper shape. It took a lot of extra effort on my part to get them to conform to the contour of the wheel wells.
The pictures really don't do justice to the amount of time and effort that went into doing all this, but I've found that most of the work done on this every nut and bolt restoration is stuff that will never be seen, realized or appreciated by anybody but me. :-)
It's been several years since I took the front suspension and steering apart. I think I got it right by doing several searches here on CC.com, referring to the manual and GOOGLE pics, but if you see something that is not installed properly, please let me know so I can correct it now.
