gremlin in power steering

[AChaulk]

I’m having an intermittent problem with the power steering/power brakes on my 2001.

I don’t use this truck every day. Sometimes it sits for 1-2 weeks at a time, due to my work schedule. I do keep it in a nice dry and heated garage, so it’s not being exposed to the elements.

So I jump in the truck after it has been sitting for a week or two and try to back out of the garage, only to find the power steering and power brakes are dead. I pull it back in and go right to the TDR web site and start reading all the good info on here. I deduce that I must have sheered the shaft on the P/S pump and spend the next two days replacing the pump with a remanufactured pump from NAPA. The install goes great but initially the pump is not working. I scratched my head for a while and decided to try priming the pump by disconnecting the pressure side of the line running to the brake boost and sticking the open end back into the P/S pump reservoir. I crank the old girl up, fluid starts to circulate and pumps out a lot of air. I reconnect the P/B line and sure enough, the brakes and steering are now working.

Since I don’t have a set of jacks to pick up the front end, I pull out of the garage and proceed to find a nice flat, smooth patch of ice to position the front wheels on. (It’s January in Albuquerque) Then I turned the steering wheel from stop to stop about maybe five times (With the engine running. A possible error there.) and everything is working great. I replenish the fluid to full and life returns to normal. I’m now feeling very proud of myself for fixing the problem for under a hundred bucks and not getting raped by the dealership.

About a month goes by and the truck is running great. I have a normal run around town for something and park it for the night. The next morning I go to drive it and once again…no P/S or brake boost. Dang!

After spending a few minutes trying to strong arm on the brakes and steering and having no change, I decide to do my little priming trick that I described above. The fluid starts flowing again and things are working normally again. Humm?

So now I figure that I did two days of replacing the old pump for nothing and pretty much wasted my time. I guess that explains why I couldn’t find anything obvious wrong with the old pump when I pulled it. I expected to find the shaft sheered or something obvious.

So now I’m pretty much back to ground zero and can’t find anything that really fits this particular problem in my thread searches on this web site.

I figure that the problem must be some air in the system somewhere. But the truck was running fine for several years and suddenly this problem started. It seemed only logical that it was a failed pump. What’s up with that?

My next step is to figure out a way to jack up my front end and do the stop-to-stop air bleeding trick and see if it makes a difference.

Anyone have any ideas as to what is really going on here?

Thanks in advance.