Reusing the Power Steering Reservoir

Remember how we talked about making the power-steering into manual awhile ago? We still have some hydraulic tubes coming out of the power steering valve that need something done with them.

Based on my internet research, it's best to have a closed system where the output power steering fluid tubes feed back into the input fluid tube, but with a reservoir in between to handle expansion from heat. There's a solution online but it's for an Acura which only has one outlet and one inlet. I spent a few hours trying to figure out if I could use the existing power steering reservoir and tubing to get the same function.


Here's our power steering reservoir from the original gasoline engine with tubes attached.


In order to get this to fit (jump forward to the last picture to see what I'm shooting for), I cut the output hose from the reservoir and turned it around so that the cut end is attached to the reservoir.


As far as the grey-green hydraulic lines coming out of the power steering valve, I unscrewed them and hack sawed them short (see ruler for scale).


For the black hydraulic line going into the power steering valve, I had already hack sawed it earlier. This is the line before I bent it.


Here is the same hydraulic line after I bent it to get the pipe in the right place.


Here is the setup I'm trying to shoot for. The power steering reservoir is now under the firewall battery rack and close to the power steering valve. I'm going to add an "L" bracket to the large bolt in the lower left corner of the picture (behind my hand) to attach to the gold bracket holding the reservoir I've rotated the input and output hydraulic lines so that they mostly line up with the hoses coming out of the reservoir. I had to cut the flexible tubing more so that things lined up correctly.

The flexible tubes were already matched with the gray-green output hydraulic lines. The black input hydraulic line clearly doesn't match the size of the output tube from the reservoir, so I'll probably have to get a pipe adapter or intermediate tubing to bridge the gap. I hope this will keep the system mostly closed to keep dirt out but still allow a little breathing in case of expansion due to heat or cold.

What a day. Good night. Cheers, Tim.