I am going to change the pitman arm in my 00' 4x4 tomorrow in attempt to rid the front end of slop. I have a puller already and i was just woundering if I can change it with the steering box in my truck or if i need to remove it. The are is really close to a cross member and it doesn't appear that there would be ample room. Also if it is nessecary that i have to pull it would if be better to try from the top or bottom.
Thanks

 

Haha I'm in the same boat as you for the most part. You can take out the 3 mount bolts for the steering gear from the drivers side wheel well so you can manover the steering gear so you can get to the pitman arm better. My problem is that I can't get the nut off. I have a wrench plus cheater bar on it and I can't break it free. So it looks like I'm going to have pull the whole thing and try it on the bench. But basically you can do the pitman arm without completely pulling the whole steering gear out.......... if all goes well. Good luck to you!

 

That could be because the nut is torqued to 185 ft lbs. That's pretty tight.

 

wow..that'll do it..

 

Haha, no wonder. Thanks for that info.

 

Thanks I have been soaking the nut and those two fluid lines religiously in PB Blaster for the last week in hope for an easy fix, but we"ll see.
Good Luck to you too navyblue.

 

May the force be with us! haha

 

The force of a 1/2" air impact gun!

 

That did it! The job wasn't that bad at all. I recomend having a pickle fork for seperation of the old pitman arm and the center link, because I farted around with pry bars for 45 min before I ran out and stole my pickle forks back. After it was out, i was forced to use a pipe wrench on the nut (I know very ghetto) because I didn't have a socket or wrench biggger than 1 1/4. Then hooked the puller up to a impack gun and pop. Threw the steering box back in, connected the lines and intermediat steering shaft , and the nut on the pitman arm in a little over 1.5 hours.

 

Yeah finally got mine too. Just pulled the whole steering box out. Luckily for some reason my step-dad seems to be a proud owner of a 2 foot cresant wrench that opens up to like 4" or something. So it definantly helped get that darn nut off. I'm not sure how anyone else got the lines off for the steering box but I was able to go through the driverside wheel well and had tons of room to get the lines off (I think mostly beacuse of the body lift). All in all it wasn't as a difficult project has I had anticipated.