[winsett]

Thanks for the immediate tips and help in here guys..

My friends 1/2 tonne stepside is back on the road with a tight steering system.

We ended up pulling the entire steering gear box off of the truck in order to apply the pitman arm puller because there was not enough space between the arm and the frame. Glad we did too because it took some serious torque, even with the puller and the gearbox in a benchvise to remove the pitman arm as well as install the next one.
Everything went back together as planned smoothly and several lessons were learned:

1. GMC and Chevy use all metric sized nuts/bolts BUT you will find that the *^%#* bastards threw a few imperial sized ones on as well (at least it seemed that way).

2. Nut sizes in particular include the rare 33mm that is an odd sized wrench in order to pull the retaining nut from the pitman arm shaft.

3. Both the pitman arm and the Idler arm are easier to remove/install if one just takes the minor extra time and effort to remove the Steering gear and Pitman arm pivoting bracket.

4. Not all pitman arm pullers are properly sized (grasping gap) for all pitman arms. We had to do some grinding on our $50 puller to get it to fit on the shaft without damaging the spines.

After all was said and done, these were the costs:

$35 Pitman Arm
$42 Idler Arm
$50 Pitman Arm Puller
$ 9 Steering Fluid
$25 15 pack Beer
$161 + 3 Educating Evenings in a warm shop with a good buddy.

Thanks for all your help and good luck with yours in the future and remember....just keep unbolting in order to make it easy!