I saw this this past wekend at one of my Dad's friend's shop. He had a '64 Studebaker Avanti R3 with the engine out. He was replacing the steering with a rack and pinion set-up. Anyways, as you can see the steering is pretty Rube Goldbergish. But ,it has to be stable (and work) b/c these cars did over 160mph from the factory new!...In 1963 I might add. He said the box, which goes near the firewall is just a plain manual box w/ a quicker ratio 16:1 P/S and 22:1 non-P/S. You can barely make out the pitman arm in the sketch. A la Land Cruiserish w/ the box close to the firewall mounted on the the frame rail. The valve is a slide type valve and the drag link going forward/backward in the end of the valve controls the flow to the ram on the front bell crank mounted in the center of the cross member. My idea was to use a power steering box and this same set-up w/ a ram and either a hot rodded pump or a bigger (more GPH) P/S Pump. This way you would have P/S and hydro assist.
What do you think? He said they also used this same style P/S on early '60's fords. It has to be pretty adaptable b/c I was at a Stude meeting and a guy drove up in a 1929 Hudson and had adapted this same set-up from an Avanti to this car.
I'm guessing that this set-up would be ok to drive on the road-which is what I'm shooting for.
Another idea that I had was to do the same thing similar with an electronically controlled soleniod valve to shut off the flow to the ram. I'm guessing you would need two valves and two return lines. one for the ram to open the flow from both ends to make it easy to turn in both directions and the other back to the pump/reservoir from where the flow was shut off. I'm thinking you could use regular power steering on the road and switch on the ram (open/ shut the valves) in the rough stuff.
I think I'm going to try it and see how it works. Who wants to be the test driver!