Reversing a Saginaw 122 / 525 style steering box

Hot rods are rooted in the concepts of being your own mechanic and crafting parts to meet your needs. The Saginaw 122 / 525 steering box has the same mounting footprint as the popular Vega, but is much stronger especially when used in a side steering application. And the short 1 input shaft version isnt much bigger than the Vega. The box needs to be reversed to be used in a side steering application. I hope to take the mystery out of reversing a recalculating ball steering box. The focus of this article will be just on the specifics related to reversing that wont be found in a normal rebuild guide. And they are all easily done by you with some minor help by friend with a lathe. After normal disassembly and cleaning, you can decide if bearings and bushing are serviceable, or need replacing. While tracking down parts, youll need two items that are not in any standard rebuild kit. Youll need to plug the original input shaft opening in the case using a shallow cup style expansion plug and youll need a different input shaft seal. Sealed Power #381-2127 or Clevite #219-2127 fills the bill nicely for the cup plug. CR / SKF #7415 or NAPA #NOS 7415 gets you the needed seal. And while parts gathering, you might as well pick up some lube. The old GM lube is no longer available. Youll read in some places about mixing CV joint lube with 85-140 gear oil. I like to use extreme pressure (EP) grease with a NLGI rating of 00. It pours like thick honey and is very suited for the application, and is easily retained by the seals. Mobil Mobilux, Shell Alvania, and Chevron Delo lines all have an EP 00 product. The part of reversing a box that seems to scare most guys away is the machining of the input shaft bearing adjuster nut to provide the opening and seal bore for the input shaft when you put it together backwards. It could be done in a drill press, but the results are much better using a lathe due to the fact you can cut a nice step bore to install the input seal. Youll need a buddy with a lathe to do a few minutes work something you should be able to bribe for a few beers. The casting has an approximate 7/8 recess above the bearing bore, so I mount the cover in a lathe and drill the cover opening to 7/8. I then decide how deep I want the input seal and cut a 1.124 diameter bore a bit deeper than the seal Im using about 0.250 0.300 deep. When doing a 3 length input shaft box, you have the whole depth of the center raised nut section to work with if you want to position the seal in a particular spot, or need a bit of clearance to clear a chassis part. When doing a 1 input shaft, you need to remove all of the nut section flush to the cover and then cut the seal bore to just over the seal depth about 0.165.

Cutting seal bore for new 1.124 dia. seal.

Completed input shaft hole and seal bore.

3 input cover on left. 1 input cover on right.

The next required step that is often overlooked is the need to flip the worm gear 180 degrees on the input shaft to keep the correct relation of the gear taper so you can correctly adjust the box. All straight forward stuff. Just keep track of the 53 steel balls and make sure they all get back in place!

Remove the ball track and 53 steel balls to flip worm gear.

You flip the worm gear to keep the gear taper in correct relation to the sector gear.

When installing the cup plug into the former input shaft opening, I use a bit of high temp RTV. The high temp stuff cant hurt if you put it near the exhaust, but more importantly to me, it gives me piece of mind when I use a baked on finishes like VHT brake caliper paint that over cure at about 200 degrees.

Plug the original input shaft hole with the shallow cup plug.

When reassembling set the input shaft preload to 5-8 INCH pounds. Tighten the side cover bolts to 32 Ft-Lbs. Set the sector shaft center adjustment to establish a 14-16 INCH pounds drag through the center of travel. An 11/16 twelve point socket will fit over the 36 spline input shaft to set the preloads.

Close up of 1 input shaft cover modified for reversed box.

Reversed 1 input shaft box.

Reversed 3 input shaft box.

So hopefully youve seen enough to realize that this is well within your capability if you are at all mechanically inclined and work carefully. The 122 / 525 series of manual steering boxes are still plentiful and offer a substantial strength benefit over the popular GM 140 Vega box. Good luck!

Jim Mountain