Manual Saginaw box "feel"/input shaft seal

Been tinkering with the manual Saginaw box from my DJ5 parts Jeep. I noticed that if I tip it all the way upside down a little bit of 90W seeps out around the seal on the input shaft. It never does this when sitting upright in the "mounted" posittion though. Is this seal hard to replace? Should I be concerned about it? Should I replace the oil inside the box? Is there an interval at which the oil inside should/needs to be changed?

On a related note, when I rotate the pitman arm through its quadrant by turning the input shaft, I noticed it has a "loose-tight loose-tight" feel every couple revolutions. Kinda like when you try to tighten down a bolt with stripped threads. Is this normal? The steering *did* feel okay to me when it was still mounted in the Jeep and you turned it at the wheel.

Don

 

IIRC the manual boxes I've turned by hand were really "lumpy" when not under load.

Re the seal, don't know. If it were mine and I could get the seal, I'd fix it.

 

Seals for the manual boxes are hard to find. I was able to find two of them (for a CJ box) at 4wd Hardware.

 

i just bought a rebuild kit for my manual box. came with 2 bearings/races, a top cover gasket, a bushing, and 2 seals.

see this thread:

http://www.earlycj5.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17242&highlight=saginaw+rebuild

 

I just rebuilt mine last year and didn't have any problems getting the parts for it. What I discovered is that the chevy manual steering box has the IDENTICAL seals, bearings and internals. I had a manual steering box off a 1970 Chevy C-10 and interchanged some the parts to make one good box. You can get the parts for your manual box from places that have Chevy resto stuff. I got mine from LMC truck. I can get you the part numbers off the boxes that the seals came in if you want them