power steering rubber hoses

OEM hoses are moulded to shape. Off the shelf Samco silicone hoses are a set diameter and flexible straight lengths. For this application the flexible straight lengths would be fine - albeit blue.

I could just cut off the bad section (4mm) or I could just use an off the shelf flexible length.

I take it there is no problem with using such off the shelf flexible silicone hoses?

They are running to & from "steel elbow-to-elbow" on the car body around the front suspension turret so not likely to flap into anything important. Bring back the go-kart with string steering... oh wall street already is... ok...

******* I pulled up the Samco catalog out of curiosity, but of course I dont know what your car IS... When I checked Ford products, there were a number of kits but most or all I scanned for were for cooling systems, not power steering systems. Maybe I got in the wrong place.

Silicone has its applications, but I dont know if power steering is one of them. It is not the be all/end all of elastomers.

If I had your present hoses, and wanted to fix something that is not yet broken, I might take them down to the auto parts shop and have them cut off a half inch or so of the cracked rubber end, and swage/press a new fitting on . I could probably get this done for US$10 or so.

If I had some more esoteric goal, I would probably just buy a set of hoses from the local FLAPS, or have them make me a set, or buy OEM from a local supplier.

Nice thing about screwing up power steering hoses, if one cracks, you lose fluid and your steering gets tough, but you dont generally lose total control. Well, very weak people do.

The problem with the silicone hoses is that if they are abraded they tend to fail. Many of them have a heavy overcoat that isn't silicone but once that is damaged a small scratch will propagate through the hose very quickly.

Do you have the tooling to crimp new connectors on?

If you're careful with them, I think they are probably fine, but they cannot take the kind of abuse neoprene can.

Hey, my 2002 drives just great with mechanical coupling.

--scott

The car is a Mazda, I should add these are the Low Pressure push-on w/ clip hoses to/from the p/s fluid reservoir - not the High Pressure with swaged fittings. I know the HP hoses tend to be expensive, but recall that most hydraulic shops can make them up far more cheaply re- using the silicone/glass-fibre convoluted heat shields off the old hoses where applicable.

Looking more closely it looks like I can trim the 4mm off the hose removing the radially cracked inner section. That does not compromise the length of hose past the hose joiner bar or the spring clip location - they were pushed an unusually long way on the metal L-pipe bolted to the car body (2inch past the barb, over 1inch past the spring clip). The L-pipe just combines joiner and fix into body-stud for physical location.

The silicone hoses come in 2 distinct flavours - Oil/Fuel & Coolant/ Air.