Power Steering Pump Rebuild

I'm trying something new for this VFAQ. I've posted an album from photobucket which takes up less space. This album basically shows how I rebuild the power steering pump as well as pre-loading the flow control valve to get rid of the infamous power steering cutout that the DSM cars suffer from. The power steering mod is covered at VFAQ.com, but a number of the pictures are offline so its kind of confusing. To view the actual VFAQ, click here. Between reading the VFAQ and viewing my pictures for reference, you should be able to complete the modification with ease.

Here's a summary of the mod pasted from VFAQ.com:


Power Steering Pump Cutout Fix FAQ

The idea:

Speed sensitive steering is a feature available on many different cars. Its job is to give the car a more stable and heavy feel at highway speeds, and to make the car less prone to sudden changes in steering angle at speeds where such a move would be dangerous. It also allows more steering assist at low speeds for parking maneuvers.

The Problem:

Speed sensitive steering is great, but that's not what our 2L (Turbo&NA) DSMs are equipped with. We have RPM sensitive steering, which acts somewhat the same. It will decrease the steering boost at highway speeds because the engine is turning 3500-4000 RPM, but unfortunately it severely cuts the steering boost in the upper-rev range, regardless of what gear the car is in. 6000 RPM through an auto-x slalom results in minimal steering assist, followed by a sudden lack of any assist. Not exactly what an auto-x driver is looking for.

The solution:

The steering assist reduction is caused by a valve in the power steering pump itself. We will be adding a spacer to preload the spring inside the small assist varying valve that closes at high RPM. This will stop it from restricting the flow of PS fluid out of the pump at high RPMs, but will not raise the maximum pressure of the fliud leaving the pump.

Some people have in the past shimmed the flow bypass valve in the pump. This is a separate assembly that sits below the assist varying valve. This resulted in more steering assist at high speeds, but accomplished this in a bad way. The flow bypass valve is there to relieve the high pressure created when the pump spins faster (high RPMs) and the flow exceeds that which is needed by the power steering system. If you shim this valve the fluid has nowhere else to go, and its pressure will increase far beyond the factory levels. I tried this, but after a 15 minute drive at moderate speed my fluid boiled and I lost steering assist. Not good.

Autocross 1-25-09

Autocross Practice @ California Speedway inner parking lot

Jan 25th, 2009

1990 Eagle Talon TSi AWD with Muellerized suspension and RA-1 tires

Wes and I hit the SCCA Autocross practice in Fontana. I just had my JIC's modified for more camber by John Mueller and holy cow what a difference. The car is very neutral and will rotate with ease. Took a few runs to get used to it though!

Special thanks to:
Muellerized...
LADSM
Team Blew Racing
Cal Club Region SCCA Solo
Road///Race Engineering
Jack's Transmissions


Here's an exterior view of the fast lap (Thanks to Wes from LADSM):


Here's Wes racing his '99 GSX:





Last minute prep on Saturday night at 2am


Camera rig



On the road


Wes and Erix chillin'


Oops, got caught


LOLz


Wes is ready to go:




Fat and the furious


AWD launch






Looked good out there, Wes!


Some other cars

Early Modifications

Time for another write up.  Since I didn’t take a lot of pics of some of the early things I did to my car, I’ll sum up some of the first mods I did. (LOL, did I just say "sum up some"?)  I’m going back in time to the day I bought my car.  Here are some pics of it that were taken before I bought it (note the ricer coffee can exhaust! LOL. I was so glad when I finally got rid of it!):

Damn, I look at these and realize how much I’ve let the exterior go.  It looks like crap now compared to the old pics.  Time to bust out the DA and some Meguiars product!

The first modification I did was the JIC Coilovers.  I already did a write up on those. You can see that here. The next thing I did was replace the stock 14b turbo with an Evo III 16g GT turbo from turbochargers.com that I bought through RRE. It's basically a ported 16g with a bigger flapper. While it may seem that I did the turbo swap too early in the build process, the old 14b was on its last leg, so I had to replace it, and I figured "why not upgrade?". The 16g GT is a pretty darn good turbo, but once you're running it on a 2.3L stroker it really ends up being the bottleneck in the system. It spools up FAST (almost too fast), but falls on its face after 6,500rpm. You can get a good amount of power out of these turbos (300whp+), but at that point you're really pushing the turbo hard and tuning at the limit. My *built* engine doesn't like more than 19psi on this crappy California 91 octaine that we get out here. I certainly have some room for improvement in tuning, but I'll cover that in another entry. Sadly, I didn't really cover the turbo build much. I only have "before" pictures. It serves as a great juxtaposition to how my engine bay looks now, though. It's hard to tell, but you can see the thrashed blades on the close up of the compressor. I added a stainles steel braided oil supply line from RRE that feeds oil to the turbo right of the filtered sided of the oil filter housing, rather than the stock line which feeds dirty, low pressure oil from the head. Oh, one more note: in the pics below you'll see the Fluidine aluminum radiator I have. It was already in the car when I bought it.

 

The next thing I did was put a 3 inch mandrel bent exhaust on it. I picked up a used cat-back from a DSM owner for $20!!! But it didn't fit perfectly so I had to pay GT Fabrications to install it, and later I had RRE put some beefy 2 bolt flanges on it. Oh, btw, the previous owner had already put a 2.5in to 3in down pipe and a 3in cat, so from down pipe back its 3in diameter w/ no press bends. The muffler that came on the exhaust is a Magnaflow straight through design. Very sleeper, very quiet for a 3in, and it FLOWS like crazy. Huge improvement over the previous owner's exhaust, which was a hacked together 2.5in press bent hunk of junk w/ a huge coffee can ricer muffler that was LOUUUDD! Also, I noticed a serious increase in power just with the butt dyno. That usually means at least a 20hp increase...and that's running low boost on the 16g turbo. Oh, I also put a ported Evo III exhaust manifold at some point, but I never took pics of it. You can see it in the pics of the 2.3L stroker build.

 

Well, that covers the early stuff. Next time, it's fixing old motor mounts followed by clutch/transmission replacement.