Naturally, I was wrong. Once I put both bolts in the idler side and went around to fully bolt up what holes I could on the gearbox side, I found there were actually two of the three pre-drilled holes on the cradle that matched up to the Pontiac frame holes. And the third was in an easy spot to drill the frame for. With the two good holes on the gearbox side bolted up and the third marked, I checked the level of the bottom of the cradle with the wire I had strung yesterday between the holes for the tie rod ends in the steering arms. And here we slap our forehead because we see we made an assumption about the idler that was just wrong. Fortunately, the mistake is easily fixed. measured the difference and pulled the cradle back out to re-drill it. The guideline, for anyone who might want to do this with your own Tri-5 Pontiac, is to drop the bottom hole about 3/4 of an inch center-to-center from the bottom pre-drilled hole. [NOTE: Later I discovered that this was not enough. The right side of the rack needs something like an additional 3/4" for a total of about 1-1/2" raise from the factory holes.] Then use the idler arm to mark where the upper hole needs to be. This cradle is heavy steel plate. I don't think a couple of extra holes will be a problem at all, especially with the heavy, hardened washers in place.
With that little adjustment, the cradle sat just right. The holes are all big enough for plenty of slop in fine tuning the position of the rack once it's reattached to the cradle. So with the rack positioned roughly and all 5 bolts started, I put the rack up on the cradle and tightened up those 4 bolts. I don't have the new tie rod ends yet (more on that later) so I eyeballed the position of the steering arms to the rack ends. Lined everything up and tightened down the frame-to-cradle bolts.
Flaming River supplied 5 carriage bolts with washers and self-locking nuts. However, the two Pontiac idler arm holes have captive nuts so I used the original bolts there. The one bolt on the gearbox side will need to be loosened and the bearing lollipop positioned. But other than that, all the bolts are now tightened.
Flaming River's instructions leave a bit to be desired. They give a lot of detail about removing the old steering system but they seem to think you will just intuit how the new system will go in. To be sure, if this were a 1955 Chevrolet instead of sister Pontiac, it might be that some things would be more obvious. But, I was puzzling over tie rod ends. Nowhere in the documentation does it say that you reuse (or get new) original Chevy outer tie rod ends. And the end of the rack is female threads where I am used to seeing male threads that you would attach a sleeve to. How do you adjust toe in with no sleeve? I did find a video on YouTube where the vice president of the company just happens to mention you reuse your tie rod ends with this kit. I still don't know if I can just rotate the rack ends to adjust toe-in. They don't seem to want to turn.
Another thing I was not clear on was the lollipop bearing, the angled plate it attaches to that bolts to the gearbox side of the cradle, and whether the second u-joint should be above or below the lollipop. No written instruction on these. There is a picture, and I guess they figured that was enough. It's way dark though and hard to see detail. I got the PDF version of the instructions off the web site and took that picture into Photoshop. With some tweaking, you can now see the answers to these questions.
The white arrows are theirs. I added red ones with legends. One more burning question I have is if I can use my stock steering wheel. Nothing mentioned in the docs. Maybe this picture from the cover of the instructions answers that question...
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