Linking your solid-axle front end can be quite an ordeal, and one of the hardest parts of it will be trying to get your track bar, aka Panhard rod, and steering drag link to line up correctly and create zero bump-steer during the suspension movement.
As your suspension oscillates, the track bar (connected to the vehicle frame on one side and the front axle on the other side) positions the axle laterally. As the track bar flattens out, it pushes the axle toward the passenger side (assuming you have a left-hand driving vehicle and your track bar is descending from the driver side). The more angle the track bar sees, the more it will pull the axle over to the driver side as it drops out. The axle not only moves up and down but also side to side with suspension movement. You want to make sure that the drag link follows the same path that the track bar does, or you will have a push or pull effect, known as bumpsteer, on your steering wheel.
If you are building from scratch, there are three important rules to remember:
1.) First off, and most importantly, you'll want to keep the drag link and track bar as parallel as possible. Keeping the bars parallel to each other will help keep them following the same arc. If the angle of one is greater than the other, then the track-bar pull on the axle will not match the drag-link pull on the knuckle, and you will find the truck steering itself during suspension travel (bumpsteer).
2.) Secondly, you'll ideally want the track bar and drag link as close to the same length as you can. From experience, we have learned that having the drag link and track bar a bit different in lengths is not as big of a deal as having parallel links is. We have had multiple good experiences with different-length drag links and track bars, as long as they were parallel with each other. But theoretically, if one bar is shorter than the other, then it will change angles faster or slower than the other bar, therefore leading to bumpsteer.
3.) Lastly, you want to try to keep both the drag link and track bar at an angle almost parallel with the axlehousing at ride height. The steeper and more severe the angle on the track bar and drag link, the more difficult steering input will be, and the more the axle will move from side to side during suspension cycling. Ideally, you want your axle moving side to side as little as possible.
It took us three different tries to get this '02 solid-axle-swapped Chevy's front end right, but sometimes it can be very difficult lining everything up and finding the right parts to get the job done correctly. Finally, after trying to cobble different things together to get our front end corrected, we went to the solid-axle-swap specialists. The guys at Off Road Unlimited (ORU) have been doing solid-axle swaps for years and fixed our solid-axle Chevy using one of their crossover-steering kits and ORU track bars on our front Ford Dana 60.
ORU has a variety of crossover steering kits and sells the parts separately if you need to custom-build your own kit. We got a kit for an '01-'06 2500/3500 4WD Chevy truck with a kingpin axle Dana 60. The kit includes a pitman arm, drag link, steering-link ends (with jam nuts), a flat steering arm, and ARP studs. | 
With its crossover-steering kit, ORU provides a new pitman arm that is correctly splined to fit the Chevy steering box in the correctly clocked position. | 
ORU wrench Alex Rock started by removing our stock kingpin cap from the passenger-side knuckle. |
Once the studs are in, the flat steering arm is installed. To get it on the studs, the kingpin spring will have to be fought, so you'll have to use some real serious leverage or some vice grips to clamp the arm down to the knuckle while you tighten the studs' nuts. | 
Once Rock had the pitman arm and steering arm installed, he went about putting the ends on the drag link and fitting it up to the arms. | 
We found that we could raise the track-bar mounting point 3-1/2 inches and still clear the frame at full compression. This would not quite bring us parallel with the drag link, but it would be a lot closer.A template was first made out of paper to figure out how to build the track-bar mount. |
This is "Crazy" Karl Knoll of Knoll Racing. And if you've never heard of Knoll Racing, don't tell Karl that! You might have read about him in other magazines, or even newspapers. This character used to build missiles for our government, and now he's putting his skills to building some high-quality parts at ORU. Knoll fabbed up our track-bar mount out of 1/4-inch plate and then drilled a 3/4-inch hole for the track-bar bolt. | 
Besides giving a front and back double-shear support for our track bar, he also boxed in the side of the mount for additional strength. | 
To center the axle under the truck, a string and washer were taped to each fender and hung down to the tire. |
We were using an ORU track bar, but Knoll had to make a new custom-length solid rod link for our truck because our solid-axle-swap kit did not allow for the same track bar as ORU's kits do.After cutting the solid stock to length, Knoll put the rod in a lathe and machined it to accept ORU's bushing-packed track-bar ends. | 
You can see how nice of quality ORU's track bars are. Their bushing-laden ends are better for street driving than rod ends are, as they will absorb more bumps and vibration than a spherical steel ball rod end. | 
After tacking everything into place, Knoll added the track bar to make sure everything would fit in mock-up. |
Knoll fired up the MIG welder and added the 1/4-inch plate track-bar mount to our axle permanently. | 
With the steering finished, Maurice Rozo, owner of Off Road Unlimited, measured how much room we had between the bottom of the frame and the original track-bar location. This would determine how high we could raise the track bar. Ideally, we want it parallel with the drag link, but that might not be an option if there is not the clearance. | |
Drag-Link/Track-Bar Checklist
_ The flatter the links are, the better
_ The more parallel the drag link and track bar are, the better
_ The closer the track-bar length to the drag-link length, the better
When we originally did the solid-axle swap, we tried to use the factory F-350 steering on the Ford Dana 60 axle. We used a modified Ford pitman arm and put the whole thing together. It was wrong because the links were not parallel, and they were both at too steep of an angle at ride height. But by far, the biggest problem was that we were using a steering style where the drag link mounted directly into the tie rod. Therefore, movement at the steering wheel would just twist the tie rod around instead of turning the tires, translating into about 80 degrees of play in the steering wheel - not really acceptable for an everyday driver. | 
Rock had gotten us halfway there. Our drag link now mounted directly to the knuckle, so there was no play from input lost through tie-rod twist, and it was sitting at an angle almost parallel to the axlehousing at ride height. But the track bar was now far from being parallel with the drag link, therefore even though we now had zero play in the steering wheel, we still had a fair amount of bumpsteer. | 
With our ORU crossover-steering kit and our custom-length ORU track bar installed, we were set to go for a drive. We were unable to make the track-bar mount tall enough to enable parallel drag link and track bars, but it was much better than it was, and both were much closer to parallel with the housing as well.During a short testdrive, we were able to get the suspension moving a fair amount, and to our delight, almost all the bumpsteer was gone. Even with the drag link and track bar being slightly different lengths, the close angles of them deleted the bumpsteer. If we had the links exactly parallel, it would still be difficult to absolutely eliminate bumpsteer throughout the entire travel of the suspension due to the varying lengths of our track bar and drag link. |