The $1,100 Motivator

Difficulty: 2 / 5

Costs: One contusion on my right ankle from running it into the lift.
three mosquito bites. Low bach ache 1.5 /5, Fluid Reservoir, $115.
Two hoses, about $150. Power steering fluid, four ATF fluid bottles at about $12 each, so $48. a yucky oil spot on the ground. Roughly $313 all in. 4hrs of my life.

The noise

It started with a whine. A bad, whirring whine from the power steering that I'd heard before. Last time, the fluid was low, I topped it off, and the noise went away. Easy.

This time I checked the reservoir and it was full. So it was something else.

I talked it through with Claude, and it told me about the filter inside the reservoir. It can clog, and when it does, you can't just clean it. You replace the whole reservoir. As it happened, I already had one sitting around that I'd ordered a long time ago. I also ordered new hoses.

I did most of the job talking back and forth with Claude in voice chat. When I got to a step, I'd just say, this is where I'm at now, what's next? If I missed something, I asked it to repeat. It's the first job I've ever done like that.

The flush that wasn't

Before the swap, I tried flushing the system. My neighbor came over to help. For a flush, you disconnect the return line from the reservoir and run it into a bottle to catch the old fluid. Then someone starts the engine for a few seconds and lets the pump push it out, while someone else pours new fluid into the reservoir. Any more than about two seconds and the pump sucks the reservoir dry.

That was working fine until he kept the engine running. It emptied the reservoir completely and pumped a bunch of air into the lines. Not what I wanted, but we got past it.

The swap

I siphoned out as much fluid as I could. Then came the hose clamps.

I was using a hose clamp wrench, and it didn't work well on the bigger clamp. I ended up destroying one of them. Luckily I'd bought a set of spare clamps ahead of time, so I could keep going. That was one thing I got right before I started.

The hoses were as bad as I'd guessed. On two of them, the ends were so hard I had to cut the tips off with a razor to get them free.

Then the snafu. I wanted to reuse the factory clamps because they're nicer than the aftermarket ones. Two of them fell into the underbody guard. Fishing them out added 20 minutes to the job.

Bleeding it

With the new reservoir and hoses on, I followed the directions to bleed the system. That means lifting the front end so the wheels are off the ground, then turning the steering wheel by hand with the engine off, holding it at full lock for a couple of seconds on each side. The first time, I didn't realize that turning the steering wheel too fast makes it overflow. So I made another mess.

I cleaned up and did it again: steering wheel lock to lock, 10 times each way. Started it up. The noise was still there.

At that point I figured the pump was bad. I'd replaced the reservoir and the hoses, bled it, and nothing changed. That's what's left, and I wasn't going to do a pump myself. Having someone replace it would have run me something like $1100.

Trying it anyway

I asked Gemini. It said the noise could be the alternator, and told me to turn on the lights and all the electronics to see if the pitch changed. It didn't. So it told me to do the bleed again. It had originally said to let the car sit overnight, but when I told it there was no frothing in the reservoir, it said I could skip the wait.

So I lifted the front end back up and did it--again. Thirty cycles this time, slow. It felt like it took forever. The whole time I was sure it wasn't going to do anything.

Then I cranked it up, and most if not all of the whine was gone.

The takeaway

I'd never done this job before in my life, and I was sure I'd done everything right and done enough. I was also tired. The job was taking a lot longer than I'd thought, I was frustrated, and I was ready to be done. So when the reference material said to do it again, I didn't believe it. Some of that was fatigue, but alot of it was pride. I don't always feel like I need to do things by the book, because I figure I know better. I think a little too much of how mechanically inclined I am, but facing a $1100 pump replacement job I accepted the fact this job was going to make me sit there for another 15 minutes bc we try'n to keep dat money.

The other lesson: more information helps. As much as I like Claude, it doesn't know it all. Asking a second AI gave me the piece I was missing. — "In the multitude of counsellors there is safety." Proverbs 11:14. That feels funny to anthropomorphize an AI, but here we are.