Meet The Player & Making parts

This is a 1956 Chevrolet Nomad wagons. The Nomads were very limited production 2 door wagons with a bunch of extra gingerbread, plus they were hard tops as well. They were made like this only in '55, '56 and '57 so they are pretty rare and desireable.

This one is owned by my good friend and neighbor who also owns Brown's Auto Glass. He has built a bunch of older Chevrolets since I first met him but now with his business doing very well he's asked me to help out with a few jobs on this project and I am more than happy to help.

The plan is to update the steering, brakes and suspension followed by a full rotissiere paint job. The driveline is also getting a major update in the form of a 2010 LS3 and 4L65E transmission. This is going to be a nice car!

I got started by installing one of CPP's new power steering boxes, this is the new design that's made just for the tri-five Chevrolets. The old 605 power steering boxes were modified Saginaw boxes, some had welded sector shafts. This does away with that. We wanted to keep the stock steering column and stock column shifter, so here's how I made that happen.

Here's the stock '56 Chevy steering box.

With this design the steering box and the shaft are one piece. That shaft ends at the steering wheel inside the car.

This is the new CPP power steering box. It's an all new design that's built just for swaps like this one, not a modified production steering box.

This is the stock steering column out of the car. This has the column itself and the stock shifter mechanism inside it.

Here's the column assembly taken apart, and here's the inner shaft along side the outer column. I have marked a center line on both tubes since they will need to be clocked the same after they are shortened.

This is the section that will be removed. It has to be taken out of the middle because we want to retain the stock end of the column to make certain the shifter works when  we are done.

Here's the section cut, and you can see my alignment mark.

Now with the section removed and everything all lined up again.

Here's both parts shortened and welded back together.

And the shortened column back together on the bench.

I also had to make this lower column support, the factory one was missing.

This is what it looks like installed. The column is considerably shorter and you can see how I had to modify the shift arm to reach outside the cabin. The steering box itself is a whole bunch bigger.

This is a view from the inside. I made the lower column mount from a poorly designed aftermarket part, I just fixed it to work with the stock column. Sweet!