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There has been some progress since the last update; not as much as I'd have liked, but some things are looking up. A lot of two-steps-forward, one-step-back.
The engine's been assembled to a complete long-block, at which point the left head had to come back off. You see, Ford casted the 460CJ heads with a "Ford Motorsport 460CJ" logo in each end. In some cases, this protrudes from the end of the head, and in this case it protruded enough to keep the 1972 Lincoln Mark IV accessory bracketry from bolting up to the end of the head. So it had to come back off to have the logo milled off.
I've figured out how to adapt the '64 FE mounts to the 429/460 block, with some milling of the back sides of the mounts and a 1/8in steel spacer plate, if it comes to this. I'm still looking at possible mount combinations that wouldn't require this level of work, and it's been suggested that I look at the '69 Lincoln Mark III mounts. I don't have one on hand yet, though.
I'm still ambivalent regarding the Gearheads steering box. As with the similar '55-57 Chevy arrangements, the Saginaw 605 steering box is actually modified by having a section of steel tubing welded to the Pitman arm shaft bore of the cast-iron box housing. A longer Pitman arm shaft is then used to space the arm approximately 6" further below the box. The frame-rail mount of the box is welded to this extension. What this means is that the weld between the tubing extension and the cast-iron box has to handle all steering torque and any shock loadings imparted to the steering linkage by normal and abnormal driving conditions. So that weld better be good, and I don't know that I trust it that far.
At the very least, I'll tear down the box and have that weld checked by someone suitably accredited.
I'm drifting back, though, toward the idea of using a GM J-car steering rack. An acquaintance has developed a remarkably simple but strong and OEM-or-better-quality mechanism of adapting the J-car rack to the '60s Ford steering linkage. The design and approach is so clever that I'm embarrassed I hadn't thought of it; I'll publish more details once he's translated it into hardware. For now, his first installations are on Mustangs and a '66 Fairlane, but there appear to be no roadblocks to its use on the Galaxie. More as this develops.