Suspension Odd steering issue

Dan02gt

mazing how much gas smell came from that tiny hole
Dirt-Old 20+Year Member
Mar 2, 2003
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Greenville, NC
So I just took the fox out for a ride and noticed when I turned left out of my driveway the steering feelt a little heavy. Anyway I get out of my neighborhood and everything seems OK till I get a 1/2 mile down the road. The steering does not want to return to center from making a right hand turn but I managed to get it straightened out and decide to go back home. On the ride back home it's extremely stiff trying to turn left and I have to fight it to keep it straight, but turning right feels fine. Fortunately no real left hand turns were involved till I turned back into my neighborhood. During the turn I heard a pop in the front end and everything went back to feeling normal.

Odd needless to say. I'm thinking rack but would like you guys opinions.

Here's what the front suspension/steering consists of.

Auto parts store reman rack
AC Delco reman pump
All new hydraulic lines
Ford racing lower control arms / ball joints
Steeda CC plates and bump steer kit
Koni SRT.T struts.
Rag joint looks the be recently replaced too

The pump and lines have about 50 miles on them due to the old one leaking, and all the other parts have about 3k miles or less on them.

Any ideas?
 
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I torqued all that to spec when I installed it and periodically recheck, but that's a good idea. I think I'll jack it up, remove the wheels and double check all the bolts.
 
I'm thinking you definitely got something loose. A loose CC plate would slide under load, and cause the front tire on that side to have all kinds of wonky caster and camber one minute that would cause you to have to fight the steering, and if it just happened to snap back into a decent position to return the tire to its normal settings then stuff would somewhat go back to normal.

When you jack up the car, unload the tire just to the point that it's no longer supporting the weight of the car, but not hanging, and see if you can push the caster camber plate at all. ( You'll really have to push/pull on it ).

If you move it at all...that'd be your problem. Get it tight. Take it to an alignment shop.
 
So I jacked the front end up and double checked all the bolts and everything was tight and I could find no slack in anything. Steering seems fine at the moment. I started the car and cycled the wheel lock to lock several times and it seemed fine. Could the new power steering pump cause something like this?
 
How new is new? If it's brand new, you need to turn the wheel lock to lock a bunch of times to get all the air out.

Very new. Like just installed. I installed it bleed the system while still on jack stands and drove 20 miles with no issues. Then this happened. So I put it back on jack stands, double checked everything for tightness, and bleed the hell out of it again. I've driven it ~100 miles since then with no issues, but I still think there might be a issue with the rack so I'm going to swap it just to be safe. The feeling wasn't like a loss of power steering tough it was like the rack was bound up tough.