power steering cooler options
 

Is there a cheap bastard version of this:

http://www.bellengineering.net/produ...roducts_id=301

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Finne...Q5fAccessories

???

I don't think I've talked to a single person who has driven a depowered power rack and wanted to keep their power steering afterwards.

Even with a smaller steering wheel and wheel spacers?

Yes. Alternative is my used one. Sitting in my trunk right now.

40% off.

Fireeeeee shipping.

Anyone with a daily driver? In a crowded city?

I'm a daily driver in the bay area, and love my depowered rack

Regarding the depowered rack, My wife don't like it :/ I love it.

I DD mine, on campus, parallel parking nearly every day. I would never go back.

This.
And this.

That does sound tempting. MiataRoadster is making a rack depowering kit, I may give it a go as I would not mind getting the PS pump and reservoir out of there.

Damn it buy my cooler

I already have a PS cooler. Snaked it off the C5, along with the PS pump and lines.

How much easier is it to steer with the seals out of the rack? I've tried a car with a looped rack and it was yuck.

Sounds like they didn't evac any of the fluid. If you get the fluid out and loop/plug the rack, it should be excellent - that's how my car is done.

Hmm, I've had mine for several years, and I must say I'm getting tired of it.
Difficult in parking lots and with race tires it takes a lot of shoulder in tight turns. I enjoyed it on the track, kinda sux around the city.
I've got a manual rack on the shelf that a spec racer rebuilt, was thinking of trying it out.

Maybe I've still got some fluid in it, I did it when it people first started doing it.

i had two other thoughts that it might make me faster in autox:

Read a piece by Mark Donahue where he said adding PS to one of their race cars improved their times by like a second a lap - his idea was that with the car so much easier to steer, he could plan more on where to put it instead of having to muscle it around.
Parallel to this is the idea of using your smaller, better controlled muscles in your forearms over the large muscles in your shoulders - more fine control. I recall something along these lines from Midohio driving school or one of my race books.

anyone else care to answer the original question?

I just re-checked the thread title. It didn't say "how to depower steering rack?"

Check post #2. 30 dollar option.

Buy my begi PS cooler. It is awesome. I have hose and some clamps with it too.

PM me the price.

To all the others: When PS conks out in WRC cars, they slow down a hell of a lot.
Not that I'm Sebastien Loeb, but I like being able to catch the tail very quickly.

Sounds like too much caster. Run a depowered car at 5.5-6 degrees like everyone else does, and you can skip the gym after work. Run it at ~3.5 degrees and you can drive it with your fingertips - and since you don't have a huge hydraulic system in the way, your fingertips can actually feel what's going on.

Look at all the effort my fingertips are putting into steering my 225mm R-comp-shod Miata through a fairly tight autocross course:



That comparison is so ridiculously flawed I don't even know where to start, Jason.

When the PS FAILS, you are pumping fluid through the failed pump, all of the lines, etc. when you turn the wheel. I've driven a car with the PS/AC belt off - it was downright awful and it's no wonder it slows them down. When you depower a rack, though, you get rid of all of the fluid, so the two examples are not even REMOTELY comparable.

Let's ignore the fact that the two situations wouldn't be comparable even in the same car, though. It's still a WRC car - NOT a Miata. WRC cars go down roads I would think twice about traveling in my truck, and they do it at speeds my truck cannot obtain on pavement, let alone on such a road. I can't imagine the kind of forces that rocks, ditches, etc. put on the steering systems, but those guys have to go breakneck speeds stage after stage after stage without getting tired out. If the wheel is snapping around, it's going to be tiring (and potentially dangerous - if a big enough rock were to grab a tire I could see a broken hand fairly easily).

I'm no Frenchman either, but I have absolutely no trouble catching fairly lurid, obscene slides, even at triple-digit speeds, with my depowered rack. Nick drove my car for a session at Buttonwillow on Saturday and commented on how easy it was to drive sideways, in fact.

If you want a cheap PS cooler, buy a cheap fluid cooler, stick some compression/barb adapters on the stock PS cooler lines, and jam the cooler somewhere. It's not difficult to do.

To the OP:

http://www.summitracing.com/search/?...20cooler&dds=1

I've got the Permacool 1200. No hard data yet as the car hasn't been driven in forever.