Old Dog, New Tricks

Taking out your car's power steering would make driving miserable. If you've ever driven a car without power steering, you know what we mean. All that extra effort turning the steering wheel doesn't just give your upper-body a workout, it's also a great exercise in patience. There are also other problems associated with pulling out your power steering system.

But there are positive aspects to it. Pulling the belt off frees some horsepower by getting rid of the parasitic losses inherent in anything belt-driven. That's good. And shedding a few pounds by getting rid of all the power steering components is even better.

In a DC Integra and an EG Civic, the power steering racks are lubricated by the power steering fluid itself. Simply pulling out the power steering pump, belt, and lines leaves the rack unlubricated and vulnerable to premature wear and locking up. In an attempt to remedy that problem, Steve from stealthmodeperfomance.com has prototyped a kit that will keep fluid in the rack without keeping the OEM pump and lines in place.

Casey Heerman offered his future road race Integra Type R as a guinea pig, and woke up early on a Sunday morning to come to Plan-B Motorsports in Irvine, Calif., to turn a few wrenches for us.

The front subframe was already pulled off of the ITR before we started the project. It isn't necessary to have the rack by itself to do this job. We would, however, recommend doing this project with the motor out of the car to free up space to work in.	After you've pulled out all of the power steering components you should be left with a bare rack. Take out the pump, reservoir, and lines. You will not be needing them anymore. The last thing to take off should be the OEM barbed fitting on the rack.	Take the smaller of the two AN adapter fittings out of the kit and wrap some Teflon tape around the non-tapered side. Do not use Teflon on the tapered side.
Thread the AN adapter fitting into its port on the rack. The smaller fitting will obviously fit in the smaller port. Thread it in by hand first and then tighten it with an appropriately sized AN wrench.	Apply Teflon tape to the larger of the adapter fittings and thread it into the port from which you took the OEM barbed fitting.	Find the straight length of steel braided line that has a straight -6AN female fitting on either side. Thread that onto one of the two AN adapters, it doesn't matter which one.
There should be another length of hose with a straight -6AN female fitting on one side and a 90* -6AN female fitting on the other side. Thread that into the other AN adapter fitting.	Thread one of the long ends of the -6AN tee fitting into the open straight -6AN female fitting on the steel braided line.	Thread the 90-degree female fitting into the short end of the tee fitting.