Some of you know my power steering troubles, but for those of you who don't.

It all started with me blowing a cap off the resivour on day, thus making a mess of PS fluid everywhere. Went and bought a new cap for aprox. $12. About a week later it did this again, so I went and bought a 2nd cap for another $12, but this time I wrapped some electrical tape around the neck hoping it would make it fit "tighter". Well that lasted about 2-3 weeks and I blew it off again. So I went and bought another one, this time it was more like $20 as I was out of town and kinda had to have one. This time I rigged up a line to it, so if I blew it off again I wouldn't loose it.

That did ok for quite awhile, no problems with blowing the caps off and loosing fluid. However I started to get noise (bearings) from the PS pump. After time it got progressivly worse and I started to leak fluid. Eventually (about 2 weeks later) I couldn't keep fluid in it and would pour out as fast as I poured it in (ask a few of the guys who were at the Decatur meet).

So one weekend I decided to tear it (the pump) apart and see if I could replace the seals on the front behind the pully. Another guy from another forum was having the same problem, so we decided to tackle it at the same time. $20 later in seals I had it fixed and ready to go back in.

Worked for about a month and than the bearings went out in it. When I replaced the seals in it I was unable to locate a replacement bearing set or I would of done it at the same time. I just kept driving it, ignoring the sound of my PS and it progressivly got worse. Once again it wouldn't hold fluid and started to leak by the shaft by the bearings. I just let it run dry and said the heck with it and drove probally another 3-4 months on it.

I bought a used one on ebay and swapped it in, well it sucked. I don't know if it was going bad to begin with, or if I'm just hard on them, but it only lasted about 2 months top and was leaking at the crank again as well.

So once again without PS for several months.

About 3 weeks ago I decided I was sick of not having PS with my larger tires and decided I wanted to do something about it. Knew if I was going to replace everything I was NOT going to go with stock. Looked into hydralic ram setups, but didn't want to dish out $600 min. to do it. I also looked into doing the dodge durango conversion that Jason did, but that still was a bit more than I wanted to spend on it. I ended up going with an aftermarket unit.

That showed up last week, and it sat on my desk waiting to go in. I needed a new pressure hose as well so I went to my local auto parts store and dished out the $70 for that as well. Needed a few other misc. parts for the conversion so got those all around.

Well today I decided it was the day to get PS back. Tore it all apart and got the new PS pump in with no major troubles. Tensioned the belt to spec and all was good. Pulled out the new pressure hose and what do you know, THE FLIPPN' WRONG ONE!. So it's official, my local parts store does NOT know how to order parts worth crap. Everything single part I ordered was WRONG. Now being pissed as a hornet I decided I was going to make it work no matter what. I have an '89 with parts mixed in from other years under the hood, but my PS is still all original '89 parts. The hose that they got for me had the hole for the sensor for the new models. Well I don't got no stinkin' sensor, and I don't want a huge hole in the side of my hose. What to do? Looked online and sensors are dang expensive. So I took my hose out to the airport shop knowing dad had many conectors for the airplanes. After digging threw about a million things I finally found something that would work and capped it off.

Get back to the house and get my hose on (being extreamly frustrated by this point, makes it hard to work). Finally got it on, double checked everything and poured some new fluid in it. Burped the system and fired her up.

I FINALLY AFTER 8 MONTHS HAVE PS AGAIN! HAPPY DAY! The new setup I have it awsome, I can turn my huge tires with my pinky without any problems at all.

So if anyone ever has any PS questions let me know, I've fought and fought with the stock system for 8 months and know it quite well now.