Replacing king pin for first time

Glad it worked out for you.That's what happens,and it has nothing to do with maintenance.When you grease your kingpins,you're greasing the spindle bushings,not where the pin goes in the eye,that's the part that gets stuck.You want that part to be tight,it's just steel against steel,no movement.If that part gets loose,you have to rebush your axle eye,and that's a serious job.
And like the other fellow said,salt can cause more problems,and there's not much you can do about that.Keep your kingpins greased on a regular schedule with quality grease,and they will virtually last forever.Grease not only lubricates,it pushes the corrosive moisture out.When I sold my last truck,it had 620k on it,kingpins were as tight as new.Helps to jack the truck up when you grease them if you can.

 

I don't change king pins on our plow trucks because they wear out. Unfortunatly once they get about 8yrs old the king pins are still tight but the outer portion of the thrust bearing rots away exposing the rollers then steering starts to tighten up. Glad you made the right decision muddydog.

 

Told you it wasn't easy.

You're welcome

 

Wait did you do it or did you have a shop do it?

 

Muddy, try a little experiment.

Figure out how much your time is worth, how much down time that truck costs you and then look at the amount of work they did by how many hours it took the shop to do the work.

It they had two people work on it, double that time and then see how much it saved you.

 

Kingpins are one job I've managed to dodge lol. Which part do they typically seize into, knuckle or the axle itself?

 

typically they will seize into the axle itself but i have seen them freeze into the bushing as well, the npr i mentioned earlier in this thread was seized into the bushings as well as the axle. of course this was a probably 15 year old truck that only had 20k miles on it and i would guess the kingpins had never been greased and it sat A LOT.

every other time i have seen them stuck they were just stuck into the axle.