I have a 95 C4. The power steering is veery hard. I heard that it might help if I changed the power steering fluid. Is this true? And if I do change the fluid, should I use OE or I heard that Lucas stop leak would be good to use. The Lucas does not say it is is a power steering fluid, and I read that it should be used as an additive, not a replacement. So, what should I do, and what should I use?
Thanks

 

If you don't know when it was last changed, change it. It's cheap enough.

Other questions you could answer to help someone help you...
Is your fluid level good? What color is it? Do you have a leak someplace?

 

When you sat the power steering is "hard" do you mean the effort it takes to turn the wheel? Is the current fluid at the proper level? Is there a grinding sound or other noises? Your steering effort will be more than say your other vehicles that you probably can turn from stop to stop with one hand. My 95 and prior 91 both have firm steering which I actually preferer when on the road.

You can siphon the existing fluid out and refill with fresh to see if any change, but as I said both one's I've owned have required more effort than my RAM pickup or Chevy traverse.

 

I siphon the fluid out of the reservoir with a turkey baster and refill. I drive a couple hundred miles and do it again. I did this 4 times. Regular lucas fluid is good. You can mix in the stop leak fluid if you want. Some here swear by it. Dan

 

Any good synthetic PS fluid is good to use! I second that the steering in this car if firm as it is, but that makes sense given the nature of these cars. I'd expect a Corvette, or any sports car, to have stiffer steering.

You can also kind of "self bleed" the system by putting the front of the car on jack stands (getting the front wheels off the ground), starting it, and slowly turning the wheel from stop to stop a few times. This process is outlined in the factory service manual.

 

The steering on my '94 takes more effort than I'd like to turn also. I'm told this is normal, and I'll have to live with it. I've changed fluid to Lucas conditioner, not Lucas stop leak...mine never leaks. I've only 23,000 mi on my car so I assume wear is no problem. I contacted TurnOne, and they were a little vague on if they could work on my ps pump to make turning easier, so I've given up. When I want more normal power steering, I hop in my '99 Miata which steers and handles so much better.

 

I've seen a few cars that had weak power steering, even after replacing the pump and rack. My solution was to back flush the system with compressed air. It's messy but it worked a number of times for me. BTW I use atf instead of p/s fluid.

 

I'm not familiar with any back flushing with compressed air. How? TY

 

@ex-x-fire

Why do you do that? What's the logic in it, I mean...

 

I also have a 1995. What I did is pretty simple and doesn't require really anything in tools, just a little patience and care. Get a turkey baster and some old towels/tshirts/car floor mats. Get some blue shop rags. Use the towels to cover your passenger tire and the surrounding engine components around the power steering reservoir cap because that fluid is runny and will get everywhere. Once you have everything masked off, take the cap off (engine off). And get a spare milk jug and use your turkey baster to fully suck out all the fluid and put it in the milk jug. I have a pretty large turkey baster and it took more than a dozen passes before I was sucking just air. Then you get AC Delco genuine power steering fluid, bought at rock auto or ebay for relatively cheap. Get 2 32 oz bottles. And now refill the reservoir again, try your best to estimate what you took out but once you feel like you're getting close put the cap back on and use the dip stick to see where you're at. Make small additions until you are within the range. Put the cap back on and take all your towels out and wipe up any mess.

Now the guy above said to drive the car several hundred miles. You can do that if you want but what I did was start the engine and let it idle a couple minutes, and occasionally cycle the steering wheel fully to the left and fully to the right and back to center a couple times. Power steering fluid is pumped around in the lines and will mix fairly quickly. After about 5 minutes of playing around like this I shut the engine off and repeated the whole process a second time. The fluid that came out a second time was more red than the first time but was still darker than new fluid, so I know I was removing additional old fluid. I only did 2 cycles of this entire process because it uses quite a bit of fluid. You can do more if you want.

Edit: also some people use ATF and PS fluid interchangeably. ATF and PS fluid are both hydraulic fluids. Ford actually uses ATF in their power steering systems. However I still recommend using the OEM reccommendation of AC delco genuine GM ps fluid, its not crazy expensive.

 

I worked in gas stations in the 60's 70's and 80's. We always used ATF in power steering systems.

 

Am still curious about this compressed air back-flush. This to me implies there must be unwanted air in the system? Is this a problem specific to c-4 corvettes? How do you do it?

 

It is a back-flush. Remove a line someplace, shoot air through it to remove the sludge. Repeat until you've sent air through all of the lines. Then refill the tank and purge air by turning the steering wheel several times. Repeat until the groan goes away.

 

TY....sounds very messy....be nice if chemical alone could remove any sludge...I'd not thought there could or would be sludge in the system, and am wondering where lines are run that I could loosen. Will be thinking on this.

 

There's no "sludge" in a PS system. Try the turkey baster method I outlined first. We are talking 30 mins of work here and 30 bucks of materials. If it solves your problem you avoid crawling on the ground and opening up a bunch of BS

 

I've done the change very similar to your instruction, and noticed no change in steering effort. This makes me think my car works the same as it did new. These c-4's just steer a little harder than I'd like.

 

Yes - This is what I'd do too.

 

Yeah I back flush with air not because of sludge, but because of debris from the pump or rack is blocking the flow. Remember the p/s system only flows in one direction, so if somethings lodged in there it is continually being pushed deeper and deeper. They used to put filters on the return side back when they had a lot of rack issues in the 80-90s but I don't know how much they helped.

 

I have considered a filter just because it can't hurt. I guess it could if it was very restrictive. Dan

CPP Universal Power Steering Fuel Fluid In-line Filter with 3/8 push lock ends | eBay

 

I was checking power steering fluid filters on Amazon and found a review where the purchaser really liked the filter. He cut it open after a few months. Maybe there is sludge afterall. Dan