smart_451_hard_steering_fix¶

1 excerpts.

Excerpt¶

youtube.com/pb_garage/smart_451_hard_steering_fix · p. 1 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

hey guys welcome to pb garage today i'm going to show you how to free up stuck steering if you find your car is really hard to steer sometimes this might be for you stick around [Music] so i've got the front wheels of the car jacked up here just so that i can turn the wheel easily and the problem that we're trying to address today is if you're steering and you find that the car uh or that the steering gets tight and then loosens up and gets tight again and loosens up and tight again and loosens up while you're driving or sometimes what it'll do is if you're driving down the road and you go into a corner it'll get tight when you're in the corner and then as you come out it feels like it's still stuck there and you have to kind of give it a bit of a shot to get it to go straight again and basically what happens is there's a little universal joint in the steering column just past the firewall and it is exposed to the elements because it's outside the sort of cabin of the car so it gets dirt it gets wet all the time gets salt on it and the little bearings inside that universal joint start to bind up so this is a little trick that you can try uh ultimately you'll probably want to replace that universal joint but this is a little trick that you can try first and it might free it up and it might let you keep driving and not have to uh get into some more expensive repairs right away so as you can see we're in the driver's side footwell here and we're just having a look under the dash you can see my pedals here and then right up here you'll notice this is your steering shaft coming down here from your steering wheel and goes into the firewall here and basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna pull this rubber grommet out this little uh seal i guess so i've just tucked that up out of the way and now we can see if we look down our steering shaft here our steering column you can just see down in there that little u-joint now it is possible to see it from the driver's foot well here you can also if you were to remove this wheel well liner on the driver's side you can get access to that universal joint just through the side here or if you have the car up on a hoist you can actually take the belly pans off and get at the u-joint that way now all i'm gonna do here i've got some penetrating lube and i'm just going to try my best to get that u-joint kind of soaked and then i'm going to move my steering wheel back and forth to work it in and i'm going to do that several times and then i'm going to hopefully feel the steering free up quite a bit and then after that i'm going to hit it with some heavier oil that'll hopefully sink into the bearings and keep it from getting seized up again anytime soon so i've managed to get in there with my penetrating lube and work it in i even managed to dribble some gear oil down in there work that in as well the only thing left to do is to put this grommet back in place so you just want to make sure you get this guy seated in properly there's a little lip on the edge of the grommet so you want to make sure that that's through all the way around and that the edge of the firewall is sitting in that groove otherwise you're going to get moisture and weather coming into the cabin so you want to make sure that's set in properly so i've wiggled that guy into place and it's i can feel that it's right up against the firewall in that groove and it's even all the way around so i know we're good to go and that's it my steering is much easier to turn now obviously i still have the tires off the ground because the car is not running and it's quite easy to do but um this little trick you know i've got cars that i've done this little service to and they're still going three and four years later and haven't started binding up again um just depends how well you're able to work that lube into the u-joint and how long it's been bad um if you can't save it you're gonna have to go ahead and replace that u-joint which is a more involved process maybe we'll get into that in another video and one last thing that i wanted to mention sometimes uh when this is binding up a little bit you'll actually get if you have the power steering you'll get a little warning here it's like a yellow steering wheel with an exclamation mark and i found that by doing this service and freeing up the steering again that'll actually go out after a few drives so if you guys are faced with that that might be a trick to help you as well so hopefully you guys have enjoyed this video we've got a whole bunch of other smart car maintenance and modifications videos so go check those out we've got them all in a couple of playlists there so thanks for watching we'll see you guys next time [Music] you