Rebuilding my front end

[THEFERMANATOR]

With a whopping 18k miles on my redhead steering box, I just had to pull it off and replace it with a junkyard unit. Back at Christmas I had pulled the box to replace a leaking pitman shaft seal. Found they had honed where the seal went in and was why it was leaking, so I put an early style wide seal in it to get it to stop pissing fluid out. Thought I was good to go, but shortly after I lost my power steering pump, got a ton of slop in the box, couldn't get it to go straight down the road, and I was getting intermittent loss of hydro boost. Opened up the pump to find it packed full of metal on the magnet and the redhead box has a ton of slack in the input side, but the adjustments are all tight. Pulled out my old 95 pump still sitting on the shelf, swapped it into my duramax reservoir, picked up a junkyard box, resealed it, and I can now drive my Burb again.

This redhead box was problems from day 1 and honestly I'm sick of fooling around with it. I kick myself for not buying a NEW Borgeson box when I could.

 

[Will L.]

Man that sux. They used to have a good reputation. That would have bit any of us, used to be no reason for concearn from them.
Sorry to hear of the wasted time, money & aggravation.

 

[FellowTraveler]

6 bolt cover box and be done with it...

 

[Big T]

I bought redhead steering boxes for both the '99 and the '94 Suburbans. Did have one leak at the Pitman arm upon install and they replaced that. Both have been fine since.

 

[THEFERMANATOR]

6 bolt cover box and be done with it...

They haven't been available for over a year(or at least everytime I checked they weren't). Rockauto shows a new one(no core charge and is a borgeson design from the picture), but it appears to be a 99-00 1500 box that has been modified with a splined input shaft(would be fine on a 1500, but I want the bigger piston box on an 8 lug truck). Starting early 2020, getting steering boxes has become difficult. The Duramax guys have been fighting junk boxes and none of the 6 bolt upgrade boxes available since early 2020 as well.

With the recent explosion in gmt400/obs popularity I'm sure parts will become available again, but it's anybody's guess when. Until that time I can at least drive mine. And I should be able to get my 95's original steering box back as he recently retired that truck from road use.