Hi, I need to mount a Saginaw 525 manual steering box onto the inside of the boxed frame rail for cross steering on my 31 Plymouth. I was thinking of welding some coupler nuts onto the frame boxing, and mount the box to them. Not sure if that would be strong enough? any other ideas? Thanks, Joel
The best way is to buy or fabricate a mount plate and weld that to the chassis. The mount needs to be thicker/stronger than typical boxing material and also has to have mounting lugs on it because the back of the steering box is not flat. The bolt pattern on the 525 is the same as a Vega, so search for Vega steering box mount and you will find heaps of them out there, like this one ...
That might work, Someone sells a plate that is drilled to bolt the box to but it shouldn't be hard to make your own and weld it to the frame and bolt the box to it. Here is the whole blooming google search with the usually hits and misses but it should turn the light bulb in your head on so you can come up with something that works good, is safe and looks presentable. Some of that Jeep stuff is a bit crude though. https://www.google.com/search?q=sag...la:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb The plate that Simon Sez showed is the one I was first thinking about.
I layed the bolt pattern out on the insde then hole sawed thru both sides with a 1 1/4" saw. I made up 3 bushings 1/18" outside dia. and about 1/2" longer than the distance thru the frame,bolted them to the box,inserted them in the sawed holes and tacked them in place.removed the box and welded the bushings solidly on both sides, then flushed out with grinder. This way the box is thru bolted and the bolts dont pinch the frame and work loose.Its how GM does it,sort of.