The Safrane.Info Forum!

As has been discussed on the parts supply thread, here is my fix for the power steering pipe. First of all, do everything you can to make sure the pipe doesn't deteriorate to the point you get a leak. Get it wire brushed and some form of white grease or waxoyl on them.







Pretty rotten!



Test to find leak



The weld



Primer



Paint





Will last the life of the car now. Poor design using mild steel in this location.

And at £140 per replacement (when they were still available) plus fitting, we know why it was such a bad design!

Seriously thats a very good looking refurbed bit of kit! One question though mate, how did you get that out without disconnecting the whole thing from the steering rack? (or maybe you did? - if so how without removing the subframe?).

It looks very good! i may well be sending you mine in a few months! I noticed you did the welding and the metal all looks super smooth.. do you do shotblasting too?

We could see the leak was from the area where it was most prone to corrosion at the front of the engine. It was actually very simple to remove. We undid the 2 nuts holding the pipe to the bodywork underneath the radiator, undid the clip holding the rubber pipe to the power steering fluid reservoir and then used a dremmel to remove the metal crimped clip seen in pictures 2 and 3. We replaced this with a jubilee clip when the job was complete so it would be easy to remove again, not that we should need to. It would obviously be much more difficult if we had needed to replace the whole pipe running to the back of the engine but this was in reasonable condition and has been smothered in white grease.

We don't do shotblasting in-house but can get anything done if necessary although you would probably have someone more local for that.

Hmm, never thought about cutting through the crimped connector, I supposed being the return pipe with less pressure it won't need crimping. Good thinking and thanks for the tip!

I'm not so sure about the one in the breaker (looks awful although it is currently fluid tight) but I may decide to get the pipe in the other safrane done as that was looking a bit rusty last time I looked but not looking like it was going to disintegrate. I suppose it would be a good idea for me to get this one done and protected before it gets any worse.

You're lucky with the two bolts under the radiator, they sometimes rust right up and round off making them a pig to remove. The last one I broke up suffered from this and I ended up doing some damage to the plastic itself. It no longer used the big bit of pupe as it just had a bit of copper pipe there (well looked that colour anyway) but it still had the fat pipe bolted in place. I wanted rid of it as I wanted to keep the plastic fan panel and ended up damaging it. I wasn't happy!

Anyway 610, thats a very good job you've done there! Thanks for posting the topic, hopefully a few others may find this useful in the future!

Great work A610 and some nice pics aswell,it seems like this maybe the route to go with a few Safrane items now,having to get items remade rather than buying new.
This PAS pipe is a bad design fault being made of steel and in an area which gets very wet.
Great thread though.

looks much better painted eh!

This is a common issue on all cars from the 90's. You can of course swap in a cooler from anything else and it will do the job.

Typical it went where the bracket is welded to the pipe

610 you say about dremeling the metal bits off... so do the rubber pipes just push onto the ends of this part?

Mine started leaking today as I had the engine out (again). It's coming from that end area so I'm mulling over removing it and putting my spare in in place but wanted to double check the pipes would fit on easily.

Thanks,

Saffles