bggrnchvy

I just wrote this summary for another site, I thought it might be interesting to some members here as well.

After a couple runs on the new front axle I could see that the 38's, crossover and front end travel were giving me a horrible inability to steer in a lot of situations. Hydroassist seemed to be the clearcut answer to remedy this.



I wanted to use my stock pump and at the time I didn't have a welder so I wanted to go single ended for the ram type. I had heard a lot of issue with the 5/8 shaft on the 1.5" rams deflecting and ruining the seal so I wanted to use a 1.75" ram with the larger .75" shaft(stength goes up exponentially as diamteter increaes). I found PSC to be highly recomended and they had just the ram I wanted along with a hardware kit of tabs and heims with it. Stephen at ExpertOffroad gave me a good price as part of a group buy so I made the purchase.







Being that I drive this truck to and from all trails and to work and school a couple times a week I needed to be able to align the toe well at the same time I set the stops at the right place. The only way to get that to work was to get a tie-rod clamp.





I already had a cover on the D60 of AR360 plate built by Jason so I just wanted to weld the tabs to the that. I fired up the welder after a little bit of practice and burned them in.



I also welded the tabs to the tie-rod clamp and put the ram on to make sure it cleared at full extension and compression.





I needed to build a limiter as the 8" travel of the ram will out travel the steering stops on the axle. To get the measurements I fully extended the ram and then ran the steering back to lock the other direction and measured the exposed shaft. I then took a leaf spring bushing I had laying around and cut it to fit with a little extra material to account for compression.







I then needed to get power from the system to the ram, I decided I wanted to drill and tap the box to do that, not buy pre-machined caps. Using Billa Vista's tech article on Pirate I located the spots. I used a split point drill with grease on the tip to collect shavings, then I tapped it to 1/4 NPT and cleaned it up with magnet and by blowing compressed air through the input ports to blow out the hydro output ports.





The other requirements it seems for a hydro assist system with longevity is a cooler, a filter and a reservoir. I didn't like the $175 reservoirs on PSC's website, but I found a unit on Ebay for circle track cars for about $40 shipped. I built a quick mount out of a piece of 1x2 .095wall and a pair of nuts welded to the back with hose clamps and mounted it about the box.







For the cooler, Im in the middle of finishing a transmission swap(60e-->80e) so I took the stock transmission cooler for the towing package and plumbed it into the return line to the pump using 400psi rated transmission hose, barbed/flared fittings/lines adn hose clamps.



For the filter I ordered a remote transmission unit from Summit and picked up a more compact filter(the larger one was presenting mounting issues) and plumbed it right after the cooler to the pump using the same method.



All thats left is to cap the return on the reservoir, have a -10JIC line made for the reservoir to the pump reservoir, pull the pump and weld a plate with a -10 JIC fitting onto the stock top and have a set of high pressure hyrdo lines made fo rthe box to the ram.

bggrnchvy

Guess not

mwalls54

did you have a question??

Did you completely remove the steering componets?

bggrnchvy

How would I steer if I removed the steering components?

mwalls54

are you using the pitman arm, idler arm and crosslink?

bggrnchvy

The supension has been...well...modified. The steering in turn was converted to crossover, not centerlink. So the centerlink is gone along with the normal tie-rod ends and idler arm.

The pitman arm was swapped to the more traditional non-jointed type and a draglink was purchased from a friend who purchased it from ORD using GM 1 ton 7/8" tie-rod ends. The tierod(singular now) was created using 1" .120 wall sleeved with 1.5" .250 wall with GM 7/8 tie-rod ends.

mwalls54

yeah i guess i ment crossover, The reason i asked is alot of people just use the ram to steer and remove everything else. which is insane because all it takes is on thing to hook on to the hose and rip it loose and your stranded. it sounds like you have a tough rig, you will have to post pics of it.

bggrnchvy

Ah, I gotcha. Yea full hydro is the removal of the secondary mechanical linkage, hydro assist is just adding a ram onto the mechanical steering.

I still thinkg full hydro for a DD is dangerous for that exact reason, material defects happen as I keep finding at work. Thats not even counting anything sharp getting to close to the lines.

Pic from back in Jan I think.


The other project underway, new trans and a flat belly pan:

mwalls54

very nice, sweet crossmember, How you like those tires??
Alot of the show trucks run full hydro. most of them use the rock ram.

bggrnchvy

Tires seem to hold there own on most everything, they don't really pull as much in mud but do launch golf ball sized chunks which is entertaining. They are loud though, kind of a passenger jet actually(same pitch).

That crossmember was definitely a project in itself but Im very pleased with how its turning out, thanks for the props.