What To Do With It ??

yep... its a keeper.
I took the steering arm off the gear shaft tonight and found my problem. there are splines on about half the steering gear that meet up with splines on half the arm. The gears splines look great... the 300K mile steering arm splines are pretty much non-existant. I cleaned everything up down there and am in process of locating a steering arm that might still have splines.... then onto the brake issue... lol.

-RPM