1999 Toyota Avalon Power Rack & Pinion Assembly TRQ PSA84968

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In this video, we're going to be working with our 1998 Toyota Camry. We're going to show you how to remove and replace your power steering rack, rack and pinion, or in some cases it's known as a steering gear.

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Here are the items you'll need for this repair: 12mm, 22mm, 19mm, 14mm wrenches, 17mm and 19mm socket and ratchet, needle nose, standard pliers, groove jaw pliers, vice grips, hammer, pry bar, measuring tape, marker, torque wrench, rust penetrant, drain bucket, marker, box cutter, flat head screwdriver, jack, jack stands

Break all your lug nuts loose while the vehicle's still on the ground. You're going to need a 21 mm socket and a breaker bar. Install your jack under the vehicle. Line it up with the pinch weld. Jack the vehicle up high enough that you can get a stand underneath, making sure you have enough clearance to remove your tire or do whatever you have to do under the vehicle. Install your jack stand onto this unibody frame rail under the vehicle.

If you need to work on the rear of the vehicle, put your jack stand underneath just ahead of the lower control arm here, right by the tow point. Once the weight is on your stands, give the vehicle a little shake, make sure that they're on there secure. Repeat these steps on the opposite side. Make sure that you bring the vehicle up so that when it sits on the other set of jack stands, the vehicle will be level. Now lower your vehicle onto the stands on this side.

With the vehicle raised and supported, remove your lug nuts the rest of the way. If you need a little more room to work, you can pull the hubcap off, remove your wheel from the hub. We've put our vehicle on a lift to make it easier to film for you, but this job can be easily done with a jack and jack stands.

With your wheel and tire removed, at the back of the steering knuckle you'll find your outer tire rod, lock nut, inner tire rod, this bellow is your steering rack. The inner tire rod is threaded, allowing us to change how far the outer tire rod is threaded on or out of the inner tire rod, which changes the direction of our tire at the three and nine o'clock axis. It's very important that we keep this angle as close as possible to the way it was when we removed our outer tire rod, so our vehicle can be safely and easily driven to get a proper wheel alignment after we've completed our repair.

Using a measuring tape at a fixed point, like the end of our bellow, we'll bump the end of the measuring tape there. Measure to the end of our lock nut, which is about eight inches. This way when we install our new lock nut at eight inches, we'll know that this total distance and angle is going to be roughly the same. Another method you can use is taking a paint marker; while a little less precise, you can mark a line on the threads at the back of the lock nut and butt the new lock nut to the edge of the mark we've made. Using a pair of needle nose pliers, straighten out cotter pin. Grab the other end of the cotter pin, work it out of the castle nut. Sometimes pinching it and rolling over the edge of the nut is the easier way to pull these out. Use a 17 mm deep socket and ratchet to remove the castle nut from the bottom of the tire iron. Leave the nut flush with the bottom of the bolt; you may have to spray some penetrating oil onto the lock nut in order to get it to release. Use a 22 mm wrench and break the lock nut loose. Don't rotate it any more than just cracking it off of the back of our tire rod end. Be certain that the ends of the nut are flush with the end of the bolt. Use a hammer. Tap the tire rod out of the spindle, finish removing the nut, and now that the tire rod is free of the spindle it shouldn't take much force to tap the tire rod out without painting over the end of the stud.

Remove the power steering lines from the rack; make sure you have a drain bucket placed under the vehicle. We're going to be using the 17mm five point or flare nut wrench. We want to be very careful, we've sprayed these with penetrating oil; we want to make sure that the nut is turning and not aligned because that's how you twist them and break them. Our line is twisting here so we're going to have to work that back and forth a bit and see if we can't get them to separate. Remove the power steering line. You can see how the nut is rotating but the line is not. It's very important that the line turns with the nut; you're going to end up twisting and breaking it, so work it back and forth like we did to make sure that they rotate independently. It's easier to start with the low line closer to the engine, give us a little more room to remove the other line once we've got this out of the way. Once the nut is all the way out, pull the line back, move it out of the way, and move on to the next line. Same thing with the other line. Once you've got it removed fully from its threads, simply pull it back and release it from the steering rack.

Remove the 12mm pinch bolt attaching the intermediate steering shaft to the top of the rack and pinion; we'll do this using the 12mm socket and ratchet. Turn your key to the "on" position and center your steering wheel. The way that we'll do this is move it all the way to the lock on one side. Now we'll count the rotations to the stopping point in the other direction. One. Two. Three. We'll now go to the middle point, which is going to be one and a half full rotations. One and a half. We'll make sure our steering wheel stays here so when we center our rack and install it back into the vehicle, we don't risk damaging our clock spring or altering the number of turns to steer, making our car steer more in one direction and less in the other.

Using a small pry bar or a long flat-blade screwdriver, pry the steering shaft off of the splines on your steering rack. Shouldn't take too much force. You may have to put a longer pry bar on the bottom of the joint. Tap it off with a hammer. Remove the sway bar and links on both sides of the vehicle; it's probably easier to remove the top side as the hardware faces you where the bottom faces in toward the frame. We use a pair of vice grips on the backside of the sway bar length to keep that ball and socket from rotating the stud while we remove the nut. Our new sway bar link that we installed earlier has a 17 mm nut on it; the factory size is 14 if yours is still original. Remove the link from the end of the strut. Repeat these steps on the opposite side. With both sway bar and links disconnected from the strut, you can lift the sway bar all the way up.

This should give us enough room to loosen those bolts. Remove the two 19 mm bolts securing the rack with a 19 mm socket and ratchet. There is a wing on the nut on the opposite side which is designed to lock against the subframe and prevent it from turning but you may still have to go in there and hold that with a wrench. Just keep an eye on it and make sure it's not spinning. Our bolts are a little tight, so we're using a piece of pipe on the ratchet to get a little extra leverage since it's too tight for us to get our breaker bar in there.

Remove the bolt from the rack and repeat these steps on the opposite side. Remove the 12 mm nut on the top of the steering rack clamp on the passenger side. This secures a power steering line to the rack, which we need to have loose in order to remove it from the vehicle. Do this with a 12 mm socket and ratchet. Lift up, and remove the line from the stud. Now that everything has been disconnected, you'll just have to lift up and remove the rack from its seats in the subframe, and then it's just kind of trial and error to move the rack around and get it out from the driver's side.

Here we have our old steering rack that we removed from our vehicle, and our new part from 1AAuto.com. As you can see, these parts are exactly the same; comes with new inner tire rods already installed. We have the same power steering lines, we have the same flange on the top to spline our intermediate steering shaft onto, we have the same inner tire rod on the opposite side along with a new bushing on a mounting point. We even have these nice caps to keep dirt and debris out of our power steering lines during shipping.

Your steering rack allows you to turn the spindles on the vehicle, which are where your tires bolt up, left and right, and steer the vehicle. Where this is a power steering rack, pressurized fluid comes in one side and out the other, and as you shift from steering left or right, there's valving in here that helps pressurize one way and the other, making it easier for you to steer. These racks can leak internally or externally causing a loss of fluid or steering pressure and making it more difficult to turn your vehicle at low speeds, so if you need to replace your steering rack, this new part from 1A Auto is going to go in direct fit, just like our original equipment, make your vehicle easier and smoother to steer, and fix you up right.

Now our old rack is going to need to have this bracket removed and transferred over to our new rack; the way you're going to do this is with a flat-blade screwdriver. Pop the clamp out and separate it, remove this center collar to make it easier. Just going to have to pry it apart. You want to try to do this so you only pry it enough to slide it off without prying it too much, because that's going to make it more difficult to reinstall. Once you've got the clamp spread far enough, go ahead and slide it off of your steering rack. Slice this rubber collar right down the middle on the bottom, opposite the pin on the top. Make sure you have a nice sharp razor blade and you cut carefully. Unwrap that rubber collar.

Install the rubber collar around your steering rack. Slide the metal collar back into place, just be careful not to tear the boot here otherwise you're going to get a bunch of dirt and road debris in there; it'll wear out the seals. Make sure that this pin on top of the rubber bushing sits into the hole underneath that bolt on the collar.

Reinstall the sleeve, and using a pair of groove jaw pliers, pull the base back together. May have to do this a couple of times to bend it back into place. Once you have these lined up, bend the tabs back into place with another pair of pliers; everything will lock together nicely. Using a flat-blade screwdriver, wedge in, loosen up these plastic caps which are just for keeping dirt and debris out of this line. A little bit of fluid may leak out, but that's okay, we're going to fill this up with some nice new fluid and bleed it all out when it goes in. Now we're going to center the rack; very carefully grab the splines for the input on the rack. Normally these do come centered, but you're going to want to double check. We do that the same way we centered our steering wheel.

We'll move it all the way to one side, put a flat mark facing us, rotate it as far as we can the other way. One, two, and three, just like our steering wheel. Now we'll go ahead and center it with one and a half turns. Now we know that we have an equal amount of inner tire rod stick out on both sides, that our wheels will move the same number of rotations, left and right.

The rack goes back in the same way it came out: through the driver's side, and with just a little bit of trial and error, moving it around until you get it to sit into its channels in the subframe. Try not to push from the tire rod ends as that's going to cause you to take the rack out of center and while a small movement may not be noticeable in the steering wheel, a large movement will mean you have to remove the intermediate shaft and start all over again. Once you have the rack set into its openings, you'll want to align the holes.

Start reinstalling all of the major components. We had to slide the rack over the passenger side a little bit to be able to get the intermediate shaft collar back on top of the steering gear; now we're going to slowly move it back into place and line up those splines at the same time. Now that the steering shaft is partially installed, we'll want to line up the bolt holes for the rack and reinstall our hardware. Remember to have the sway bar fold all the way up and out of the way when you do this. We'll start the wing nut on the other side. It may help to use a pry bar to prop up your steering gear; just make sure that that sway bar doesn't move in the process. It bolts back down with your 19 mm socket and ratchet. Remember, once you have those threads started you don't have to hold the nut on the back, because that wing will lock against the subframe and keep the nut from spinning while you tighten this side down.

Make sure the steering shaft is fully seated onto the splines; you'll notice that there is a channel in there where the bolt slides through to pinch it shut. If it isn't lined up, your bolt won't go through, so make sure that it's fully seated. Reinstall the bolt once you're properly seated; you may have to pry down a little to get it started. In this case we're lined up all right. Tighten that back down with a 12 mm socket and ratchet.

Install the top power steering line first as you're going to need more room to swing the wrench. You should be able to start that by hand. We'll tighten that down with our 17mm flare wrench; again, you want to be very sure that when tightening this, you do not twist the line. You want to get it down nice and tight so it doesn't leak, but at the same time, going too tight and making the line twist is going to cause it to break, give us a leak. Once the top is in tight, reinstall the bottom line; again, starting it by hand, tightening it down the rest of the way with our flare nut wrench.

Reinstall the bracket for the power steering line onto the stud, along with the 12mm nut, which we'll tighten down with our 12mm socket and ratchet. Reinstall the top portion of your sway bar link into the strut. We'll get the nut started on there and then clamp the backside with a pair of vice grips to keep it from rotating while we tighten that down. Again, our placement here is a 17 mm; your OEM will have a 14 on them.

We'll line up our nut with the mark we made on the old rack, and we're going to measure from the tip to the inside edge of the nut. In our case, it's an inch and three quarters, so now we'll measure an inch and three quarters, and mark that on our new tire rod. Now this is not going to be perfect, but it will be close, and that's what's important here; we just need this to be good enough to go get an alignment, so we'll spin our new jam nut down. Set it right to the edge of that mark and if we did everything right, we're at an inch and three quarters to the end of our new nut. We'll spin our tire rod onto there and reinstall it into the spindle.

Your tire rod end, bring that right up to our lock nut. Don't want to rotate the lock nut in the process, so we'll rotate the whole tire rod. Reinstall into the spindle. Install your castle nut. Install the new cotter pin with the longer leg facing down; bend it down and under the nut. You can leave this leg straight, bend it over, or just cut it short to get it out of the way. Using your 22 mm wrench, tighten the lock nut down against the tire rod, make sure that it lines up with your paint mark. If you have to adjust it, crack the lock nut loose, use a 14 mm wrench to rotate the inner tire rod until it lines up with your mark or the correct distance.

Hold the inner tire rod with your 14mm while you tighten the 22 mm lock nut back down against the tire rod. After completing this repair, bring your vehicle to have a proper four wheel alignment done as soon as possible. Start your lug nuts. Check that they're all seated. After any power steering system repair where you've lost fluid, like a line, a pump, or a power steering rack, you'll have to refill and bleed your power steering fluid. To do this, we'll remove the cap on the power steering reservoir located on the passenger side of the engine bay, just behind the coolant overflow. Fill it up with some fresh, clean power steering fluid.

Now we'll work the wheel, and we do still have the vehicle jacked up, so the tires aren't touching the ground. We'll work the wheel all the way over the lock in one direction, again in the other; after replacing our power steering rack, our wheel does still move the same number of rotations so we know it's on there centered. Bring the wheel back and forth, lock to lock a couple of times; then we'll start the vehicle and repeat that process. That can get a little messy. Now that there's no whine when moving our steering wheel from side to side, we'll shut the vehicle off, top off our power steering fluid, wipe up anything that's spilled during the process and reinstall our cap. Jack up on your pinch weld.

Be sure that where you jack isn't going to interfere with your ability to remove the jack stands. Bring the vehicle up until it's off the stands; remove your stands from under the vehicle. With the stands clear, lower the vehicle, move to the other side and repeat these steps.

If you've removed the tire, only lower the vehicle until the wheel touches the ground. With partial weight of the vehicle on the ground, torque your lug nuts to 76 foot-pounds in a cross pattern. Then you can remove your jack the rest of the way. Reinstall your hubcap, align this notch with the valve stem on the wheel, snap it back into place.

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