Since Dylan lost steering after a minor accident on December 27, 2008, his car has been in the garage where my car SHOULD be. He actually managed to break the “rack” as in “Rack and Pinion Steering” – snapped it in right in half — the steering wheel turned with no connection to the wheels. Sigh. The shop wanted $1800 to fix it, which is more than the car is worth, so I figured I’d give it a try.  If I could fix it, great. If not, the Kidney Foundation will give you $50 and tow it away.
So, I spent the winter scraping windows and warming up my car despite having a nice warm spot in the garage intended for an ADULT car. Well, today I FINALLY got the steering gear out of the silly thing. In the Haynes book it always looks SO simple. ” Just remove these four bolts, and these two hoses and away you go”. But, as most of you know, there’s ALWAYS a hitch. One fool nut that I COULDN’T get off and I ended up rounding badly. So annoying. Yesterday I ended up taking a drill to it to cut as much as I could off it and then WHACKED it with a screwdriver and hammer until the nut cracked and came off. VICTORY! Kinda.
The next “easy step” was removing the power steering hoses. I couldn’t for the life of me get them to budge either – Release-All and everything. Nothing. On my friend George’s suggestion I went out today and bought a “line wrench”. It’s just like a regular closed wrench, but with a notch cut at the end to get it over a line. Worked like a charm and the steering gear is out. Putting it back in should be easy — SHOULD BE. We’ll see.
It’ll need an alignment when I’m all through, and the tie rod ends were totally shot, so it’s probably good to replace those, but they’re cheap. All told, it’ll be about $300. Not bad. Hopefully we can sell it for a grand or so and be done with it.
Hopefully.