How to Replace a Bad Power Steering Pump ?

Your spouse has been complaining about the minivan being hard to steer. Time to pick up a bottle of power steering oil on the way home. After you add the fluid, though, you notice a puddle of something under the engine.


Within a minute of idling, the puddle is bigger by almost exactly 1 pint of power steering fluid. An odd coincidence, indeed. Checking the pump--which is buried well under the engine--reveals a lot of wet, oily stuff in the vicinity. Out come the ramps, and the minivan goes up in the air. If you're lucky, you'll just have to replace a cut rubber hose or kinked steel line. But if it's not your day, you likely have a defective power steering pump. Red or oily stains in the driveway or garage--under an area where the transmission isn't--may also be a clue to a leak that's slowly robbing your hydraulic assist.

Everybody Has One

If you've never had to wrestle with your steering wheel, you've never driven a vehicle made before, say, the '70s oil crisis. Except for a few late-model cars that use electrically powered steering racks, virtually all cars and trucks on the road today have power-assisted steering. The pump provides hydraulic boost to the steering gear (the mechanism that actually pivots the front wheels) to reduce the driver's turning effort at the wheel.