1965 C10 LWB Project Build Thread

[JohnIL]

Over the winter, my son and I found a good excuse to travel to the Speedway Motors headquarters in Lincoln, Nebraska. The retail side of the operation is just a walk up counter in the corner of the warehouse. No fancy storefront. But, the Speedway staff is impressively friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful. Beyond the giant warehouse full of go-fast parts, the big draw is the Speedway Motors Museum of American Speed. The museum is an absolute must-see. The shear scale, variety, and quality of the museum is overwhelming. If you're ever in the Lincoln area, it's definitely worth spending a few hours emersed in automotive history. While we were there, I took the opportunity to load up on parts for the '65 C10. My long term plan for the truck included power steering and an automatic transmission. So, I bought one of Speedway's power steering conversion kits and one of their tilt steering columns with provisions for an automatic transmission. Fast forward to August. After dropping our son and his square body pickup off at college, I suddenly have time to work on my own project truck. By coincidence, the bearings in my factory steering column began failing this spring. Throughout the summer, the steering has been getting rougher and rougher and the effort needed to turn the wheel has gotten heavier and heavier. The time was right to install the new Speedway parts.

The power steering installation went well. My only complaint is that Speedway's instructions where very lacking. Thankfully, I found a couple of YouTube videos of CPP kit installations, which are VERY similar.

Here's the parts list I bought from Speedway Motors, including part numbers. I'll explain my decisions as I go through the installation.

• Power Steering Conversion Kit - Speedway Motors 91015019
• 30" Chrome Tilt Steering Column w/Shifter - Speedway Motors 91032978
• Collapsible Steering Column Shaft - Ididit 4468301
• Steering U Joint 1"DD to 3/4" DD - Sweet Mfg 91032401
• Steering U Joint 13/16" 36 Spline to 1" DD - Sweet Mfg 91032396

Power Steering Pump
The Speedway kit includes a '68-'72 style power steering pump, which looks right at home in a '65 engine bay. It comes with a very simple mounting bracket that seems to hold the pump well enough, but it doesn't do a great job of aligning the pulley with the crank shaft. The bracket is intended to align the PS pulley with the second (middle) groove on the crankshaft of a small block with a short water pump. The problem is that the bracket doesn't hold the pump perfectly square with the front of the engine block. It may be an optical illusion, but the pump appears to be twisted away from the center of the engine. Now that it's all installed, the belt seems to track OK, but the alignment isn't perfect. I will have to keep an eye out for signs of early belt wear.

Steering Box
The kit comes with a '73-'87 style power steering box. The kit includes a mounting bracket for the outside of the frame and a reinforcing plate for the inside of the frame. The brackets utilize a couple of the factory steering box mounting holes, but you have to drill two new mounting holes through the frame. Then, you have to drill out one of the threaded holes (lower front corner) on the steering box to remove the threads. This hole was the hardest part. Being cast, the steering box doesn't drill well. I ended up expanding the hole using a reamer. With all the holes drilled, you have to manhandle the box into place. It takes lots of hefting, fiddling, and adjusting to match up the holes. Once the box is mounted, the rest is pretty straight forward. Connect the pressure line between the pump and the steering box, flush the system with clean fluid, connect the return line from the steering box back to the pump, and burp all the air out of the system.

Tilt Steering column
Once the pump and steering box were mounted and plumbed, I turned my attention to the new steering column. I have the same complaint about installation instructions. The Speedway column is a good product, but there are literally no instructions. I learned how to install the new column by removing the factory column. Trial by fire. The key to success was researching the products (through the Speedway online catalog) ahead of time and making sure I bought the correct collapsible steering shaft and U-joints to connect the new box to the new shaft and the new shaft to the new steering column. The steering box has a 13'16" 36 spline input. The steering column is 1" DD output. In between, I used a collapsible shaft with 3/4" DD on the top end and 1" DD on the bottom end. The trick to making it all work is getting the correct conversion u-joint on each end. See the parts list above for part numbers.

I purposely went with a 30" column (I think the factory column is 32"-33"). The shorter column puts the steering wheel a couple inches closer to the dash. This is more like the modern daily drivers we're used to. Adding the extra two inches and tilt makes a HUGE difference in cab space. It's much more comfortable now. With that said, the new column presented a couple of challenges.

1. The steering column is almost too short.
More accurately, the Ididit collapsible shaft was almost too short. If either the steering column or the collapsible shaft were 1" longer, the installation would have been a bit more comfortable. As it was, there was no room for error. I had to remove the aluminum rivets from the collapsible shaft and extend it a fraction of any inch to mate up to the u-joints on either end.

2. The wiring for the column doesn't match up with mid-1960's dash wiring.
The column is intended to be "universal". It comes with a GM 3 7/8" electrical connector. It will not match up with factory '65 8-pin dash connector. American Autowire makes an adapter harness that should make this a plug-n-play connection and it adds a hazard flasher circuit (Part Number: 35780). Unfortunately, I didn't know about this harness until after I started the column installation. So, instead, I did it the hard way, which really wasn't all that hard. I clipped the connectors off both the column wiring harness and the dash wiring harness, then matched the wire colors together. The only caveat is to know that the light green wire on the dash harness goes to the gray wire on the column harness. All the other colors match. I did not build a hazard flasher circuit, but that would be easy enough to add later. For the record, the hazard flasher circuit connects to the brown wire on the column harness.

As I mentioned above, the column is equipped with a shifter for a future automatic transmission. I simply left the shift lever off the column and set it aside for the future automatic transmission swap.

This wasn't intended as an installation write-up, but I hope some of this information will be helpful to others doing similar installations. I'm happy with the end result. The truck is MUCH easier to drive now, especially when tootling around town. The tilt column and additional couple inches of arm extension make the driving position more comfortable. The steering wheel isn't right in your face anymore. Apologies for the lousy pictures. Power steering isn't a very photogenic installation.