Hot Rods Steering pulls when turning? !UPDATE 2/9/22!

IF stock the 41 pickup has 'lets say' 4 degrees of caster built in with the running board level to the ground = 4 DEGREES

when you alter this as you have done by lowering the front and raising the rear
you are removing castor
you probably have ZERO degrees.
simply triangle - wheel base 112
difference in ride height front to rear 4''
112 over and 4up
= 2 degrees
4 - 2 = 2

you only have 2 degrees castor

bit of toe out and the steering wheel will snap back
you need one of these
Aluminium Castings: Front Radius Rod Dropper Ford V8 32-40 (macsspeed.com)

to drop the wishbone rubber ball mount down

oddly when you keep them flat - level running boards and fit a reversed eye spring, you gain 2 and get 6/7 - ideal for power steering

 

Thanks for the info. I forgot to mention the frame is a 1940 pickup.

 

that bench seat is real nice.
does the bottom of the bench protrude forwards like that stock?

 

I don't know. The person who started the project had the seat done. It's pretty comfortable for long trips.

 

Too much caster but should drive nice and straight down the freeway.

 

Wish I had of known about that when I was setting my wishbone up to clear my transmission pan. I ended up making something similar by taking another cup and mounting it on a flat plate and putting spacers on the bolts and under the cup so it wouldn't flex. Don't know how much it increased my caster, but it did make the car drive better, and the bone cleared the trans pan.

 

Here are pics of the steering.

 

A LOT of scrub radius offset for a drum brake steel wheel combo
Are there inch thick spacers or something? Whatever, I don't like the look of that.



This radius rod mounted to a flat plate attached to thin channel metal is feeble also.
I hope there are doubler plates or gussets on the other side. All your braking forces go through that, apart from locating the front end.

 

Something looks way off with the steering arms. The tie rod ends should be pointing straight up and down. It almost looks like those arms were tightened up while bottomed out agains the backing plate and not seated fully against the spindle maybe? Something for sure looks tweaked. Those are Chassis Engineering “deep drop” arms and with the tie rod on the bottom, I don’t think you can get it much lower than it is. Rear sump pan or a little pan modification should take car of clearance issues.

 

I don't have the pickup specs but my 1946 Motor manual says that 35 to 46 Fords call for 4-1/2 to 9 degrees positive caster.

From the looks of things you may have all of nine degrees and may have more than that. There is a misconception among hot guys that a hot rod Ford has to have a crap load of caster just to make it track but yours shows that excess caster defeats the purpose and the steering is always trying to return to center no matter what you want to do. That would be fine if it was a land speed rig where you don't want twitchy steering but not too cool for a street driven rig. I'd think somewhere between 5 and 7 degrees would be a lot more in the ball park. From the looks of things it appears that someone did a wedge cut on the bones to add caster. That may the issue as it added too much if they were modified.
First step is to get the caster, camber and toe in checked out after you get the tie rod/drag link thing fixed.

 

You can clearly see in the fourth and fifth picture that the dropped steering arms are hitting the brake backing plate and are actually bending the steering arm mounting bolts upward, compared to the top bolts. If those arms were made to accommodate a disk brake kit they would have used a spacer between the backing plate and the front steering arm mounting bolt boss, in the rear the caliper mounting bracket would be sandwiched between the backing plate and the rear steering arm mounting bolt boss. Hopefully, a set of bushings and longer steering arm bolts can fix that problem.

The truck looks great but is too low in the front for the style of suspension used. I noticed the front axle rubber snubbers are missing from the frame, undoubtedly due to only having about 2" of suspension travel between the wishbone and the frame. The easiest way to fix this is to reverse the reversed front spring main leaf (in other words, back to stock), it will give you roughly 2"more inches of suspension travel and at the same time help keep the drag link from hitting the pan. This of course will raise the front of the truck up 2" but function needs to come before good looks.

 

^^^^^What he said. The steering arms are not right. I think that there are two designs on the Lincoln backing plates, one deep setback and one shallow. Someone else may know. That needs correcting. (With spacers)

Post a pic or two of the motor mounts. Is the trans a T-5?
Maybe you can raise things an inch.

 

He has the repro Lincoln plates, those are as shallow as they get. I agree that the bolt-on arms seem to not be seated correctly. Beefy spacers (not just a stack of washers) should be installed to alleviate the clearance issue.

Then, find one of the rear sump pans and hopefully that will give you the clearance needed for the tie rod.

Don't drive the truck AT ALL until the arms are fixed.

 

The use of 48 Ford rear axle bumpers is a good alternative to the original 40's, front and back. They are slightly shorter, and softer. Will give you more clearance before bumping, and a softer hit.

 

Found the info on backing plates. Thanks to @HemiDeuce
Shawn PM’d me that he had 39 Lincoln brakes.

 

The OP might have been told that they are '39 Lincoln, but he has repro Lincoln on there. Those who know, can tell the difference.

 

Given what I see in the photos and knowing we all want our rides to sit nice and low I might look into just raising the motor in the front with a spacer on each side. Once you move the steering arms inboard your Ackerman is going to be even worse and its way off now. Fix your steering arms, correct the Ackerman then get the motor off the steering arms. Truck sits to nice the way it is. I don't think I'd want to raise it 2".

 

The more I look at it the worse it gets. It's probably not an issue functionally, but the king pin lock bolts are not the same...passenger side you can't even see the bolt from the front, and the drivers side looks like it was inserted from the back instead of the front, opposite of the passengers side.

The pitman arm looks like it is hanging down a fair bit...if you bent the end of it up, that should also move it "out" and give it a little more room around the oil pan, and level the draglink out making it parallel to the tie rod.

This looks like there is a lot of stuff that is wrong on that front end, but also that one afternoon would solve.

 

Yes, those steering arms are a worry. The bottom of the yoke is bottoming out on the backing plate before the bolt bosses are close to being home. But they wrenched it tight as possible cockeyed anyway. Who does that?
It is a major hint that everything needs looking at.

As the others have said fix that first. The linkages will then need adjusting for length*, then you can see/observe/photograph where the drag link is in relation to the pan.

Raise the engine? Mmm...let's see the engine mounts from above.

Indeed.

*This affects toe-in as well.

 

Raise the engine and trans.

Take out the lowered spring in the front, and put a stock height one.

You don't need a lowered spring and a drop axle.

Put bump stops in.

 

First, thank you to everyone for taking the time to look at the photos and letting me know what you saw. This is my first solid front axle vehicle and my first custom. I have a little experience working on old cars, but it was a stock 1968 Mustang. Everything I do I've got to learn how to do it from some really good friends here in town that know what they're doing, or you guys here on the Forum. So I really appreciate your help.

To be honest, this wasn't the biggest problem this truck had. You should have seen the wiring job under the dash, so many bare wires and double grounds! The worst was when you filled the gas tank up. It leaked like Niagara Falls. Watching a river of gasoline shower from under your truck and make it's way through the gas station parking lot can really generate an "OH SH!T" moment, especially when the unusually noisy fuel pump is right in front of the gas tank. Now that all of that is fixed, it's time to fix the next thing.

I called a buddy of mine who has lots of experience working on solid front axles and were going to take a look under the truck this weekend and come up with a game plan and a parts list to:

1. Get the steering arms bolted to the brake drum correctly.
2. Get the tie rod away from the oil pan: a) raise the motor, b) get a rear sump oil pan (which may interfere with the drag link), c) both.
3. If the caster is greater than 9 degrees find a way to get it between 4.5 and 9 degrees.
4. Get bump stops.
5. Correct any other jinky work on the front suspension.

Did we miss anything?

After all of that I'll need to align the front end and hopefully it will be ready to go.

 

As X38 mentioned, give attention to the radius rods attachment points.

 

The motor mounts look wore out to me, so I had already ordered another set. They're sitting on the bench ready to be installed.

Yes, that's a T-5. Its a FV-1500 out of a 90's S10.

 

Also as X38 mentioned...check your scrub radius...if you draw an imaginary line through the king pins to the ground, the tire should land on that spot. The closer to the centre of the tire the better.

Check to see if you have wheel spacers/adapters, or a lot of offset to the wheels (doesn't look like wheel offset is the issue in your pictures).

 

Too much caster angle will cause the wheels to want to go straight in turns. On a turn the wheel should want to return to straight ahead when you let go of it but not like you describe. Caster angle is not set in stone when using suspension modifications. You're likely looking at a "try, try again" situation to get it right. Which oil pan are you using? You may need to go to dropped steering arms at the spindles.

 

Ackerman, ackerman ackerman. Without it you're pushing a plow around corners. steering will fight like Hell "not" to cooperate. There's way more to good steering than just bolting parts in place. Getting this correct will also change as you change Caster.

 

In addition to your list:
As @Pist-n-Broke mentioned, check the Ackerman angles. If you're not familiar with that term do an internet search and do a little reading. As long as you're re-engineering the steering linkage this would be a good time to include this.

Also, rather than rear sump pan, it looks to me like that pan could be massaged for a little clearance. A little cut, bend, and weld will be cheaper than a new pan.

Somebody mentioned the scrub radius, and that's a good point to check, (but we regularly see much worse than what we see in these photos by folks running finned drums, or disc brakes) but nobody mentioned scrub line. From those photos it appears to me that the pitman arm/drag link is the lowest point on the truck, below the scrub line in case of a front left tire failure. That could turn a flat tire into a major disaster. This may just be due to the angle of the photos, so my perception could be off, but you really wouldn't want everything coming down on the pitman arm just from a flat tire.

That's a great looking truck, the stance is great, it is worth getting all this right to make it drive and steer as well as it looks. And to be safe! Please don't put an IFS under that nice truck. There's no guarantee after all the expense and labor to install it you wouldn't have similar issues to deal with sorting it out. Do the sorting on the straight axle and keep that a nice traditional hot rod.

 

This is ultimately what you want the tires doing once done. Each front tire on correct radius line to center. Notice the Red line through each spindle center to king pin.

 

I admit, when you typed your first message I had to google ackerman. The pics on Wikipedia didn't make sense but your drawing above does. This is interesting stuff. Can you describe what effects the ackerman being to "high" or to "low" would be?