Christian Hazel
Brand Manager, Four Wheeler
The steering system of early Jeeps equipped with the factory Ross cam-and-lever mechanism can be marginal at best. When new or freshly rebuilt, it performs adequately with stock-sized tires, but add a locker or bigger tires and you'd better hit the gym to turn the wheel. Once these systems get a little wear in them, there can be as much as a half-turn of play in the steering wheel. Sure, the bellcrank can be rebuilt, the drag link can be rebuilt, the steering box can be rebuilt, and so on down the line, but we can't see putting all that effort into a steering system that isn't going to make your Jeep easier to steer on the road and won't help you turn the wheels on the trail.
When it came time to upgrade the steering of our '71 CJ-6, we briefly considered rebuilding the stock steering system but then came to our senses. Our Buick V-6 already had a pump attached to it and we had an old Saginaw car box in the shed, so by using Advance Adapters' power-steering conversion kit (PN 716806 for early Jeep vehicles), converting our '71 over to power steering was easier and considerably less messy than fooling around with the stock manual system.
Advance Adapters has done its homework to make the conversion relatively painless. There is a little bit of fabrication required, but the Advance Adapters kit includes everything you need to complete the conversion except for a power-steering box, pump, and hoses. We completed ours in an afternoon and were rewarded with one-handed steering in any terrain.
