MANUAL STEERING FOR DAILY DRIVER

[Dartnut]

I changed my '69 Dart over to power steering from manual because I have major shoulder damage on both sides.
Now I can drive the car and not hate it.
I have (which I believe) is a firm feel box with a slant 6 Saginaw pump.
I bought the box used off a guy that changed his '72 Swinger over to manual and got it cheap.
Also, it has a rebuilt steering coupler on it which helps a lot with the typical ''wandering'' feeling our older cars with power steering are known for.
So yeah, put me under the heading of a ''sissy ***'' if you want to...
And I have sure owned plenty of cars with manual steering and I didn't have much of a problem driving them when I was younger.
To name a couple of them, I had a '69 Super Bee 4 speed and a'69 Coronet R/T 4 speed.
They were a ***** to parallel park, but again, I was a lot younger then...

 

[Brooks James]

How do you determine what the ratio is? Is it printed on the box? Mine takes so many turns I was thinking about adding a suicide ball to the steering wheel.

I believe a 24:1 box is 3 1/2 turns
16:1 2/ 1/2 turns
Don't know about 20:1

16:1 manual box may present parking difficulties

16:1 box solved the steering/ headers clearance problem on my Dart with Doug's D453 headers

 

[Witchboard]

Mine is 3 turns from center to lock, one way. So I guess that would be six turns from lock to lock?

 

[Slugfarm]

I run a PST 16:1 box on a /6 with manual 3-speed on my 65 Valiant with the original land yacht steering wheel and it's a blast to drive except when I need to parallel park on the hill in front of my house, but if I stay patient and relaxed it's manageable. I wouldn't go with front tires wider that 6" though and there's a strong argument for 5.