Nice work, Joe! What made you decide to replace the steering rack? Mine's at 130K and not feeling any sloppiness on steering yet. And I do need to replace my plugs soon.
My rack was actually failing. It started making an intermittent "clunk" noise when it would cycle left and right. Almost like there was a bad tooth or something inside it. The sound got progressively worse over the past year or so, and started to sound absolutely horrible (almost like a bad CV joint or something). Then it started leaking a little bit of fluid a couple of months ago, which got REALLY bad over the past 2 months. I had to add almost an entire bottle of power steering fluid to the system over the past month.
Anyway, the new rack is now installed, along with new LCAs and new wheel bearings. The legendary Toro offered me his assistance, and I wasn't going to turn that offer down, so we did it at his place on Saturday morning. Took us about 5 hours total to do the whole thing from start to finish. Wasn't a very difficult job, just a LOT of individual steps. Basically removing almost the entire front suspension except for the UCAs, unbolting the R180 front diff, etc. The hardest part of the whole job was sliding the old rack out and sliding the new one in, and attaching the hard lines back to the rack. You're just dealing with very little space and you have to turn the whole assembly in multiple different directions at several points where it would hang up. It ended up coming out the passenger side the easiest. This would be a much easier project on a 2WD Xterra, for sure.
A word of advice for anyone who does this job or even someone who does a Titan swap or replaces most of their front suspension: Do not drive the rig with the steering wheel very far off center. I was taking it to an alignment shop immediately after the install so I didn't worry about trying to adjust the tie rods and straighten the wheel out. The wheel was almost 45 degrees off center after the job but the truck was driving relatively straight, so I figured I could get it over there with no issues. Well, with the wheel already turned almost a quarter of a turn in one direction, it put too much pressure on the clock spring (or spiral cable, some folks call it) inside the steering column, and as I made the turn out of the neighborhood, the cable broke. Immediately got an airbag (SRS) light, as well as a "SLIP" and "VDC OFF" light. Also lost the horn, and the cruise control buttons don't work. Now I'm shopping for a new clock spring, and I'm not looking forward to having to change that out.
I know it's not like me to skip the photos, but we got so wrapped up in this project that I barely remembered to snap any. Here's all I got:
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