Heavy Steering

[olliewarwick1]

Hi All,

I've done a search through the forum already, but I can't seem to find exactly the same symptoms.

The steering on my car has always felt a bit heavy, not too bad, but not quite as light as the steering on my Dad's old 19.TD (Mine is a 110 HDi SX). Further to it being heavy, if I turn the wheel quickly as though I'm swevring or doing a quick 180 the steering momentarily goes hard as though the engine is turned off. It almost immediately comes back to life and goes back to being, just a little on the heavy side. I ready through a few things a while ago and one of them to was to check UJ on the steering column, I did this a while back, covered it in WD40 and later with grease but it didn't make any difference.

I'm pretty sure it gets worse with the cold weather and in fact last year I seem to remember if I turned it lock to lock when I first started the car up, it helped out.

It has been like this every since having the car, but as I've not got the majority of the other things sorted (excluding the wheel bearings, bushes and ball joints) it's the next job on the list.

I've never run hydraflush through the system, but that said it had an awful leak once and I lost the majority of the lhm fluid so I know that it's new. I have cleaned the LHM filters and it's a beautiful luminous green.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ollie

[olliewarwick1]

Oh, and one other thing, the observant of you will note my post a couple of weeks back that my hydraulic pump went, so it's a replacement known to be good hydraulic pump with a new belt with no obvious signs of slipping.
Ollie

[Old-Guy]

I've had a couple of LHM leaks in the last year or so, and each time I've had very similar symptoms when the LHM level started to get a bit low - not low enough to put the warning light on, but at or a bit below the bottom mark when I checked.

[Xaccers]

My money is on an air leak getting into the pipe that feeds the pump from the reservoir.
Make sure to use good jubilee clips at both ends and make sure they are bloody tight.
Had this with Juliet, replaced the original clips with good jubilees and it sorted it.