my post from preludepower after i gutted my steering rack




since Lisa got her 4WS and her old PS stuff didn't work, i took her rack and decided to gut it

Honda-Tech.com: Honda Prelude: Write-up: 4g prelude manual rack conversion

it was pretty easy, done in a couple hours which most of it was me bitching about snap rings, theres some stuff that doesn't come out easily (fall out) but it really wasn't hard at all

so anyways, i tested my old rack yesterday, the TQ required to turn it was 15 lb/ft. as a side note, make sure your column is unlocked, i couldn't understand why i was getting 70+ lb/ft of TQ, yeah....i'm dumb

anyways, my old rack wasn't connected to anything, but the lines were there, all open. so i imagine it was pretty close to the effort required with the lines looped, as no hydraulic lock was created.

so with the new rack in, and set on the ground and pushed back and then in the original spot so the tires were in the right spot, the TQ wrench read about 10 lb/ft, so thats about a 33% decrease in effort to turning the wheel at a dead stop


now i could have done much better tests and all that crap, but i think these ballpark numbers were gotten pretty consistently, so i think its a decent indicator of what gutting the rack is worth, weather or not its worth it to you