Adapter fittings

[enjenjo]

This post is about adapting power steering pumps, and box or racks to hoses you have or can get. Don and I were discussing this yesterday. It also works on fuel lines.

Eaton Weatherhead has three adapter fittings that are real handy for mixing and matching parts. The part numbers are 1445, 1446, and 1447. They adapt 3/8" inverted flare nuts to O ring seal connections on steering boxes 1445 has 14mm by 1.5mm Oring seal on one end, and 3/8" female inverted flare fitting on the other. 1446 has 16mm by 1.5mm Oring seal on one end, and 3/8" female  female inverted flare fitting on the other. And 1447 has 18mm by 1.5mm Oring seal on one end and 3/8" female  female inverted flare fitting on the other. For whatever reason Weatherhead has discontinued the 1446 fitting which is the most useful one of the three ad it fits some mustang racks and most GM steering boxes and racks since 1978. In addition it can be used on GM fuel lines and filters to convert to 3/8" inverted flare.

So what are the alternatives? Well there are several.16mm is .004 bigger than 5/8" and 1.5mm threads are only off by .005" from 18 threads per inch. So you can actually easily force a 5/8" by 18 TPI flare nut into the 16mm female threads. I might suggest a little never seize while doing it, but it does work. To get an inverted flare seal you can use a Four Seasons 16749 ORing to Flare Air Conditioning Adapter. I have also done this on GM fuel lines and filters.

I also have a die to recut the 5/8" 18 threaded flare nuts to 16mm to make life a little easier.

On the pre78 GM power boxes the pressure side uses 3/8  female inverted flare fitting , but the thread size is 11/16". Parker Hannifin sells the correct hose end, or if it's in good shape you can salvage a original nut, cut the hose end off next to the flare install the 11/16 nut and reflare it, single flare is all that is needed, much heavier wall tubing. The 1447 18mm fiting also can be made to work. with a little modification.

Metric tubing also comes in a 9.5mm size and uses a  female inverted flare fitting  nut  with a 16mm by 1.5 thread. 9.5mm is less than .001" smaller than 3/8". They are a bit hard to find here, but are used on some fuel injection lines, and can be bought from Inline Tube.

Does any of this help?

[sirstude]

Speedway has the fittings for steering boxes.  Really work well, you can go to the local hydraulic hose place to get your hoses made, instead of trying to piece together power steering hoses from parts.

[enjenjo]

Speedway has the fittings for steering boxes.  Really work well, you can go to the local hydraulic hose place to get your hoses made, instead of trying to piece together power steering hoses from parts.

At this point so does Summit Racing, but unless someone else steps up to make them they will get hard to find. And the price  is going up already, nearly doubling in the last year.

I had a PS hose made yesterday, one of the fittings was $47., total for a 14" hose was $81.

[jaybee]

Good stuff. I keep my antennae up trying to figure out what they use for conversion steering boxes for various cars. Mostly they seem to be steering boxes from later model cars with the mounting ears sawed off and new mounting plates welded on. Seems like it would be almost as easy to provide a guide for drilling new mounting holes and maybe a spacer plate to put the pitman arm the right distance from the frame rail, should the geometry still not be quite right. Of course if you did that you couldn't sell a $180 steering box for $475-700.

Obviously that doesn't apply to things they flat discontinued like Vega steering boxes.

Maybe I've totally read this wrong, but things like steering boxes are awfully expensive to engineer from scratch for 50-80 year old cars.