There was another small problem that had been at the back of my mind since I'd had to remove the Suburban from the shop. From dead center I could rotate the steering wheel 2 ½ turns to the left but only 1 ¾ turns to the right. Making a left hand turn was a breeze, but not so much the other way. After doing some research it looked like a simple enough fix. From what I'd read, I could just pop the pitman arm off of the bottom of the steering box, rotate the steering wheel a bit and pop it back on. Unfortunately, it wasn't that simple. As it turns out, the 4wd power steering box is a bit different than the 2wd version. Whereas the 2wd box has a bottom steering shaft which is splined all the way around, the 4wd shaft is only splined on roughly ¼ of its surface. The pitman arm itself is unique in the same way with ¾ of the inner surface smooth while ¼ of it is splined. There went that plan.
Here's what I'm talking about
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I closely inspected the rest of the steering system looking for some way to make adjustments to it. The steering wheel and intermediate shafts were fixed as far as their orientation to each other and the steering box. The power steering box itself isn't really adjustable to compensate for this sort of thing either. The steering arm is bolted directly to the steering knuckle and I knew better than to play with the tie rod. With the pitman arm sitting fixed to the bottom of the power steering box shaft the only component left was the drag link. Hmm.... that drag link looked adjustable too....
Out came the big pickle fork.
With the retaining bolts out and plenty of lubrication sprayed on the threads I could start lengthening or shortening the draglink itself. My logic was backward at first so I made it shorter which only exacerbated the problem. Back out it came and into the bench vise so I could get a good grip with some Channellock Big Azz pliers and lengthen it out again. After re-mounting it on the vehicle, and some more testing and tweaking I was able to get it near perfect, 2 ¼ turns left and 2 1/8 turns right.
One more item scratched off of my to-do list.