I am afraid that if I thinned it out, it would end up coming out of that old lower seal, and I would be, in effect, lubricating my DRIVEWAY!!!
I love these technical threads - and this is a good one! Directly from the FORD shop manual. And it is interesting to note that the correct way to do it is to pull the pitman arm off the gear box to get rid of all steering movement and to read the inch pounds (4-5 inch pounds is spec for bearing preload and 9-10 inch pounds in spec for center high point of worm gear) at the steering wheel nut.
It reads, "If the torque or preload is not within specification...." What IS the specification? Thx. Good info.
I put it in the text of my post for a manual gear box. 4-5 inch pounds of bearing preload and 9-10 inch pounds at high center point of the worm gear. Another interesting FORD trivia answer. There are different specs for manual and power steering gear boxes! Power steering is 3-4 in lbs and 8-9 in lbs respectively. Also note the specification for the lubricant is different! Gotta love these FORDS! Here are the charts from the bible.
That is a more precise description of our gears...in another thread, we had varying answers for "chock to chock" number of turns, and when I went out and actually turned both of mine, it was within 1/4 of what your two pages say. Which was about 1 to 1-1/2 turns of what others were citing (don't remember which thread, and these numbers are estimates from memory).
Anyone know what the lubricant ESW-M1C87-A is? It's in the manual as the lubricant for the manual boxes.
The earlier suggestion of chassis grease and STP is a good one. If you want to stay FORD correct: I did a little digging and found the updated FORD part number for this product is the same as listed for the power steering box - C3AZ-19578-A. Interesting that the shop manual lists both old and new product numbers.
