with all this said i would go ahead and pin the crank, especialy if pully did spin on crank and evidence shows it did. .02



fuerzaws6

 

pinning the crank pulley is act. very easy to do. if you have that bolt come loose again, Id do that.


on another note, your screwed about the strg gear. Im a mech. so I see that stuff all the time, low fluid wont do that, but internal restrictions/fluid leaking out of the correctpaths internally in the strg rack will make it turn normaly one way, and really stiff in the other direction. better drive it for a bit to make sure that pulley doesnt loosen up again before replacing the rack and pinion gear.
sorry. :

 

hmm - doesn't sound like good news for the steering rack! i know at one point when i was pulling the rack out of the car that I pulled and twisted on the end a little bit and shifted the steering linkage (not sure what else you call it). Could that have just introduced some air into the system? I dunno how I would have damaged it otherwise, it was still working correctly when i shut her off when the pulley came loose. The ONLY other thing I could think of is that in order to work on the car I had to push it to another location while another person turned and steered the car with no power steering (car off) - does that damage these racks?!

Thanks Irocss85 - you've been really helpful so far (as well as many others! )

 

no, moving the outer tie rod/inner tie rod wont hurt anything. have you tried to purge the air out of the rack yet, just to be sure? the way you do that is to fill the reservoir to the full level, then lift the front end off the ground , turn key on, eng off and turn the steering wheel all the way back and fourth about 10 times each way. let it down, refill the reservoir, start it up, and turn several times back and fourth until there is no power steering whine and it turns normally. give it a shot. should have mentioned this last time. good luck.