front spindle reaming for larger ball joint?
 

Anyone ever try reaming a front spindle taper to accept larger ball joints. Had a call about a 64 3/4 ton truck being converted to 1 ton and the taper of the spindle was not tapered deep enough to accept a larger ball joint.

One option the mechaic was thinking about was reaming the spindle to accept the larger tapered ball joint... lots of meat on the spndle to play with. It may be cheaper cost to do it that way then to swap everything.
Thought I'd ask the mebers if they had any experience with this.

If the spindle is not hard, reaming with the right reamer should work very well. It would take a good machinest to fixture the part during reaming so that the newly reamed hole is in the right location. If it were reamed off center there would be problems with alignment.

Jim

The problem with this is gonna be finding the correct Taper Reamer. I would suspect, from my experience as a machinist, that ball joint tapers are not offered as a standard for taper-reamers.

Just a thought to consider because custom made tooling is very very expensive.

We have customers do it all the time on the circle track cars. I know there has to be several different reamers out there but all we sale are the 1-1/2" Taper per foot.

OK.. thanks for the tips... I'll see what he comes up with.

www.goodson.com has the reamer you are looking for. You can sometimes find a ball joint from another type of vehicle. I am using an 80's blazer tie rod end on my 68 4x4 power steering conversion. I was going to ream the steering arm, but found a drop-in replacement.
Erl

Yes circle track guys do it all the time. Check with some of the circle track vendors for the reamer. Very easy mod to do yourself. No fixture needed as you already have a hole to start with. No problem with alignment. I can't count the number of times I've done this. If you need help with details or vendor let me know.