Power Steering - slightly technical

I got a gangster deal on my whole Integra setup (Front knuckles, brakes, arms, subframe, steering rack; Rear trailing arms, brakes, control arms, camber links, compensator links; all 4 spring and damper assemblies), so my original intent was to use as much of that as possible to save money.  Turns out lots of the suspension was not ideal for a build that I wanted "done right", so I sold it to a coworker for a decent loss.  I did, however, hang onto the subframe and steering rack.

I knew that the initial build of my car would be without power steering, mostly motivated by these factors:

-cleans up engine bay

-simplicity

-weight

-I was shooting to build a real "driver's car".  May be laughable at its current state, but take a look at the McLaren F1.  That car had no systems to impede your driving experience, such as traction control, ABS, and you guessed it, power steering.  As an additional bonus, my car will cost about $950,000 less than the McLaren F1.  Whatever it takes to rationalize spending lots of money on a 13-year-old stripped-out economy car.

I digress...  my initial plan was to convert the power rack to manual; or more specifically, looping the lines to create a closed system that was unassisted by high-pressure fluid.

I've read many ways to do this on the trusty internet.  In the interest of learning something, I decided to take the steering gear apart and figure out (a) what I was doing, and (b) if this was a good idea.

Enter picture 1, the steering gear disassembled:

Whats going on: 

***Top Left is the steering gear, or the pinion assembly.  The splined portion is what mates to the universal joint (just inside the firewall) and the steering column.

***Top Right is the DC Integra universal joint, which I heard is required to mount this rack to an EK chassis

***Bottom: the steering gear housing with I/O ports to the pump, reservoir, and either side of the rack pistion.

Looking more closely at the steering gear, there's a cage with 3 oiling grooves and 4 black seals.  Take a look at those inner grooves

Next take a look at the pinion shaft assembly without that cage:

Similar looking grooves... try to figure out what's going on.  Check out the Helm manual (Factory service manual) for a phenomenal description of the power steering system, or look it up on howstuffworks or something.

It's hard to see, but there's a small diameter torsion bar inside the inner cage (or wtf that thing's called...)

The next pic gives you an idea of how the fluid's distributed:

--The left-most holes (to the left of the outer cage) are the low-pressure return to the reservoir.  

--The left-most groove is the high-pressure feed to one side of the power piston.

--The Center groove is the high-pressure feed from the pump

--The right-most groove is the high-press feed to the other side of the power piston.

You also see my handiwork in the background... super destructive removal of the circlip holding the outer cage to the pinion shaft assembly.  Once I replace that, the rack is again functional.

Super-summarized Conclusion: After all this, I've decided that converting this rack to manual steering (no fluid assist) would be using the steering gear structure and valving-system outside of its design intent.  I'm all for modifying stuff, but being "outside the design intent" for a relatively important system like Steering may not be the best idea.

There aren't pictures like this anywhere else on the internet (afaik), so hopefully you can learn something here.

The next task is to try and locate a proper manual steering rack.

To Pick-and-Pull... and beyond...

-Jkwan