Adding KITT's Steering Linkage

My goal for today was to clean up the garage and go through the rest of the hardware looking for other brackets that may need to be painted with POR-15. I did not end up finding anything that I thought needed to be painted aside from the parking brake assemblies for the rear calipers, the steering gear box bracket from yesterday, and a fuel and brake line bracket that I missed in the last round of painting. I am sure there will be more, but for now I think these should take care of any more unexpected surprises.

I spent quite a bit of time putting tools away and doing some general clean up in the garage. I am looking forward to being able to put the Freestyle back in the garage, but the replacement hatch glass is still preventing that and I am not yet ready to move that back under KITT.

I decided to work on the steering linkage, once I got tired of picking up. ;)

I started by bolting the idler arm back into place.

Then I connected the inner and outer tie rods using the adjusting sleeves and tightened down the inner tie rod ends to the center link.

I attached the idler arm to the center link stud and tightened down the castle nut. I am not torquing anything at this point.

I attached the outer tie rod ends to the spindles and just turned the castle nuts on to hold them in place.

I also set the Pitman arm on the center link stud and hand tightened the castle nut. I realize that this needs to be installed on the steering gear box first, but this way it is out of the way and in place for now.

With KITT's steering linkage in place, I moved on to cleaning and prepping the parking brake assemblies for the rear calipers and the fuel and brake line bracket. I also cleaned up the bolts for the steering gear box bracket with the wire wheel.

Here is the fuel and brake line bracket. This is also the bracket that holds the fuel tank breather that I cleaned up this week. I used the wire wheel to knock off as much dirt and rust as I could. I did the same thing with all of the parking brake assembly parts.

Then everything got a thorough scrubbing with wire and nylon brushes and MarineClean.

Prep and Ready was then applied and allowed to soak on all the parts.

Everything has been cleaned and prepped and is now drying. Once dry they will be ready for POR-15.