Body Stripping and High Steer

For the last month I have been patching, welding, and stripping the paint off of the tub. Most of the stripping was done with a wire wheel because there were 4 coats of paint on the truck, making sanding very time consuming. Here is a picture of the tub with the paint stripped off:

Next, I removed the tub one last time to paint the bottom with two coats of Zero Rust. Here's the bottom of the tub ready to go back on the frame. I'm going to do the wheel wells once the tub is on the frame. Next, I re-installed the body onto the frame for the last time. To make the truck easier to move around the shop, I decided to go ahead and install the steering. For this truck, I am using Trail-Gear's high steering setup. The Steering arms and tie-rod bolted right on. Since I am using saginaw power steering, I had to do some custom fabrication on the drag link. I made a insert for one end of the drag link to accomodate a 1-ton chevy TRE. Initially, I mocked the steering up to have the drag link bolt to the bottom of the pitman arm. The paralell drag link and tie rod look pretty good. However, upon a full left turn, the drag link hits the leaf spring.

I'm sure that the springs will settle a good bit after I put the engine weight on them, making this worse. I decided to ream the pitman arm out to allow the TRE to mount above the arm. Here is how I am going to run the steering. I am missing one Jam Nut for the Pitman arm TRE, and this should be in tomorrow.

This should give ample clearance between the springs and the drag link, even under flex. It'll also flatten out a little under the engine load.

That's all for now. Next up is to prime and paint the tub, as well as begin putting together the powertrain....