Dana 30 Steering Connect

[BrendenP99]

I wanted to know if anyone has done this. So I have a 1991 ford ranger 2wd and doing sas with Dana 30 from a 92 xj non cad. I wanted to know if I drilled out the 2wd ranger Pitman arm and welded in the standard tie rod insert from goferitoffroad.com if the xj drag link would then connect? Would that be the only think I need to change to make it work? Thanks in advance.

 

[Shran]

Old post, but don't do that. The pitman arm is cast iron. If you weld on it, you will weaken it. There are a thousand other ways to accomplish what you want to do, you just need to match the taper of the pitman arm to a tie rod end, and attach that tie rod end to your drag link. I don't know if the Jeep TRE is the same taper or not, if not, use a Ranger TRE and attach it to the Jeep drag link with a threaded sleeve.

 

[Kurt.king870s]

I hate to dig up an old thread again, but what I did worked really well so here goes.

Take one of the short tie rod ends off of a ranger knuckle, and cut off half of the sleeve that it threaded into.
Then go to the d30 and cut the sleeve closest to where the jeep pitman arm was in half. Then take your tie rod end from the ranger, and weld its half sleeve to the remaining half sleeve on the d30.
This will give you 1 working adjuster sleeve so it will align properly

JUST MAKE SURE you grab the correct tie rod end for this. If you get the end from the wrong side of the ranger, the adjuster sleeve that was welded together will not work properly. Take the 5 minutes to figure out which one you need.
I'll try to get a picture up so you guys can see it. After I did this mod, I didn't have to do any other tie rod modification. It just bolted on and I aligned it with the adjusters just like it did when it was new.

 

[Kurt.king870s]

Sorry the picture is utter crap, but the left side goes to the pass. Knuckle and the right side attaches to the pitman arm. So basically the left half of the sleeve is exactly how it was, and the right half used to be on a ranger knuckle.

After I welded the sleeve together I ground it flat again and then I wrapped a steel strap around it and welded it on each side. Just make sure there is still a gap so that the sleeve can expand and compress for sdjustment.

If you back away from the picture it is a bit easier to make sense of my freakshow.

 

[BrendenP99]

All is good. At first I actually picked up a ranger 2wd passenger side tre and screwed it in the xj steering link sleeve and it fit right in the ranger pitman arm. I used that for a while then I ended up actually getting a gm 1 ton steering from RuffStuff and reamed out the knuckles and pitman arm to accept the bigger Tre because I had horrible geometry. Now she drives like a dream!

Before

After

 

[Kurt.king870s]

Looks pretty nice! You got more lift than me as well, so that might make it a bit different.