Thread: 1968 Plymouth Valiant 1st Gen HEMI

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Another Sunday come and gone and we made some more progress on the Valiant.

A couple weeks ago I had to put a new set of tires on Donnas’ car and while I was at the tire store I got a quote on a pair of tires to replace the Drag Radials on the Valiant. It’s the same store Cade works at so Saturday I sent the tires and wheels in with him to have the new tires mounted and we got them on yesterday. One more thing off the to-do list.


ZZZ R Tires by M Patterson, on Flickr


Then it was on to what should be the last thing before we pull the mockup motor and trans out and install the motor that actually runs. We needed to connect the EPAS power steering unit to the steering box.

The original steering column passes thru and is secured to a floor plate bolted to the firewall and the steering shaft is pretty much a straight shot all the way down to the steering box.


column 2 by M Patterson, on Flickr


The A body EPAS unit puts the steering shaft in the original location and the new steering shaft is designed to connect to the EPAS unit with a straight coupler.


Z Coupler by M Patterson, on Flickr

We found out with this built a straight shot to the steering box just barely interferes with the back corner of the cylinder head. We didn’t need much room to clear so the straight coupler was replaced with a steering U joint which would allow the shaft coming out of the EPAS unit to be shifted slightly to the drivers’ side.

The factory floor plate had oversized mounting holes so it can be shifted slightly during the installation. I didn’t know if the factory plate would let me move the steering shaft enough to clear the head so I built a new plate out of aluminum just in case.


ZZZ Floor plate by M Patterson, on Flickr


As it turned out the factory plate gave just enough adjustment to clear the head. The rest was fairly simple, another U Joint on the engine side of the firewall and a shaft and coupler to connect it to the steering box.


ZZZ Steering shaft by M Patterson, on Flickr


Everything turns smoothly with no binding and like a lot of jobs on a project like this it turned out the hard part was just figuring how to do it and collecting the right parts.

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