I've made several posts before about my car overheating and losing coolant. I've also posted about my P/S pump going out and the fluid being a weird color. I got a few good suggestions but none of them panned out. Well, I put my thinking cap on and figured that the cooler was mixing the heated p/s fluid with the return line of the coolant. This would be putting the 250* p/s fluid into the "cool" side. Plus, the coolant would be flowing through the p/s system. Since it was so thin it wouldn't be doing jack sh**. This is also the reason my front seal blew out on the p/s pump since it was always overfilled.

Well, I finally got off my *** and tracked down a z/28 upper radiator hose w/o the power steering option. This parts $50 through the dealer and unavailable through kragen or autozone. Napa auto carried it though for half the price. I hooked everything up minus the cooler and it's extra lines and now everythings perfect. The needle doesn't even come close to 210 and my p/s is back to normal. I bought a small tranny cooler that I'll hook up tommorow since hte stock cooler is over $120. I'm going to be getting back into roadracing though so I'll probaly buy one later on and just run both coolers.

I'm posting this because I didn't notice any threads on a p/s cooler failure and thought it would be good to have up for future referance.

 

are you running any other type of fluid cooler for the power steering pump now?

 

Well, I'm going to use the tranny cooler as one for now, I just have to go set it up. I'll probaly buy a stock cooler sometime in the future through the GM online parts site. Last I heard it was about $70 instead of the $120+ that the dealers want. I set it up how it is right now that way I could make sure it was the cooler that was causing the problem before I went out and bought one.