Slick 60's

This is on my 71 F100, but could relate to any Slick retrofitted with the Ford or non-Bendix power steering. In fact I wanted to install P/S on my 66, but this has me reconsidering that.

I am running 8" chrome cragars, and 25560r15 Firestone tires all around. They are not balanced. 30 PSI in all tires. Ford power steering with the correct p/s column.

At speeds over say 25 mph, seems like it is overly sensitive. I used to have 21570r15 on the front, and thought those were a bit twitchy, but eventually got used to it. I thought a wider tire would reduce some of that floating, over-assisted feel, but seems like it is worse now. Granted, I need to get the tires balanced, but not sure that is the whole problem. I could have got 70 or 75 series 255, but thought that a shorter tire would behave better.

Any ideas? Maybe the pump needs checked? Or the steering gear?

They way it is now, I am thinking about swapping back to manual steering and putting 215's back on the front - except I figure 8" rims will be to wide for the tires. And not sure if I still have the original 17" steering wheel, I swapped a cheap 15" grant wheel when I did the p/s.

Mine is kind of twitchy to ( when you steer a little it sometimes goes to much) but I don't know the answer to the problem . I was thinking the tires are to big. I have a rebuilt box and new tie rods but I still have to check the king pins. Tom

I have almost the same setup on my 67 and I don't find it sesitive at all.

One thought could be the caster. If you don't have enough then it ciuld be ti easy to tun at speed. When I got my frontend aligned after I rebuilt everything, they had to put 2* more back into the beams to get them back to stock.

Maybe an alignment issue.... Ackerman angle is off or possibly not enogh caster? Either of the two will wear tires but cause drivability issues.

King pins that are installed too tight or not greased good will cause that problem. james

Thanks for the replies.

Hard to find places in my area that will even touch an old twin I-beam truck. In the past I have gotten lots of replies like, "We don't have it in our computer, so we don't know what to do."

Have you tried a shop that primarily deals with trucks? We have a shop here in Dayton that does everything from cars to heavy trucks, their main customer base is heavy trucks.