My first post, may sound silly but I'm confused. Replacing power steering rack assy. It is all unhooked except the input shaft. Every instruction I see says "remove the pinch bolt from the ujoint to seperate the rack from the steering shaft. There is no pinch bolt that I can find. The rack input shaft is splined into a piece that has 2 half inch legs that fit into slots on the u joint assy. there was a snap ring that appeared to be holding this assy inside the u joint. I took the snap ring out but can't get the rack to seperate from the u joint at the end of the steering collumn.
don't want to force any thing and break something. What am I missing, or do I just try and pry it apart?

 

The Ujoint at the bottom of the steering column is inside the car, covered by a plastic shroud.
There are bolts that go thru the Ujoint to pinch it to the splines; However the bolt also goes into a slot on the shaft, so it has to be completely removed.
You may need to lightly pry open the pinch point of the clamp.

 

That's what I thought I would find, but when I took off the plastic cover and looked at the u joint, there was no bolt and no split to pry open. Totally different arrangement.

 

#15 in this pic ...turn the steering wheel and look at all sides; Be sure you're looking at the LOWER Ujoint.

 

This is photo of ujoint, no bolt anywhere on it. It just has two lugs that mate to ujoint housing with a snapring inside the end of the housing. You can see the snapring where it dropped when I took it out

 

You're looking at the upper U-joint, which you can see in that picture located towards the bottom end of the shaft #12. Gotta remove that plastic shroud #17 (or maybe just look thru the hole?).

 

Thanks Jim. all the instructions I've read didn't mention that there were 2 ujoints and 2 plastic shields. This is my grandaughter's car. I'm used to working on heavy equipment so this is uncharted territory for me.
I'll get deeper into it today.
Bill

 

Success, Got the new one in and working, even got the steering wheel centered. Will take it tomorrow for a line up. One possible problem, the tie rods on the the new rack have a little less threads then the old one by about 1/8th inch. The tie rod ends were good and tight, no need to change them, but when I put them on the jam nut is almost to the bottom of the threads, not much room for adjustment. May have to go with a thinner jam nut if they can't get the toe in right. Any one else had this problem. The rack I got is a rebuilt from O'Reilly Auto parts.
Thanks again for all the help
Bill

 

Wait for the alignment to tell you that. It might be that they don't need to go down that far.

 

I measured the old unit and set up the new one as close as I could, with the old unit I had maybe 5/16 inch of thread showing above the jam nuts, with the new one less then 1/8 inch, hopefully I've set it pretty close. If I have a problem I'll post it for others.