Skip to main content

Hack Engineering Power Steering Lines

There was a fair few things that bothered me when I stripped the car. The main one was the use of "push-on" fittings which were a pain to use and most of which had perished to the point of requiring destructive removal. Given this and the terrible state of all the power steering hoses I knew straight away that I wanted to find an after-market alternative to replace the aged hoses and try and remove the "push-on" fittings from the system.







During my research I found that there was a fair few people out there that had hose companies make them up replacement hoses instead of getting OEM replacements. As much as I liked the idea of this it still left me with basically the same hose setup so I kept looking and stumbled across the Hack Engineering Power Steering Lines Sets (for E46 M3).




There were three options to chose from:
  1. Replace the lines but keep the "push-on" connectors to the cooler
  2. Replace the lines and upgrade the cooler to AN fittings
  3. Replace the lines and upgrade the cooler to an aftermarket option
Obviously option 1 was no good as it kept the very connectors I wanted to remove so it had to be option 2 or 3. I didn't really see much of a need to upgrade to an aftermarket cooler and also believed that if I had upgraded all the lines to AN fittings then I could swap in an aftermarket cooler at a later date if it became apparent that it was required. So with that in mind I settled on Option 2 and placed an order.



I am hoping that this works as intended and I don't suffer any power steering fluid temperature issues as I am not really keen to procure and mount an aftermarket cooler just for the power steering rack. I guess we will have to wait until I get this in and get it to the track, but anecdotally I have never heard of anyone having any power steering fluid temperature issues so this should work out.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

///M Clubsport Door Sills Search

Whilst starting the preparation and install for my Karbonius CSL Carbon Fibre Roof I started thinking about the final overall style of the car again. It particularly came to the front of my mind when a friend, who was working with me on the roof install, asked what the deal with the CS badge on the boot was. I realised tat whilst that choice had made sense to me it may not really land with others who are unfamiliar with BMWs and understand the history of the CS badging or the idea of what the Clubsport moniker encapsulates. From previous research and investigations into Clubsport branding from BMW that I could use to keep the style I knew of the somewhat rare E46 330i Clubsport so i thought I should take another look to see if there was anything from that that might help pull the theme together at all. It was at that point that I came across the ///M Clubsport door sills that are used on the  E46 330i Clubsport.  They struck me as perfect to help tie the theme together. They a...

Syncro Design Works RTAB Install

Now it was time to get around to trying to install my new Syncro Design Works RTAB's. As I had not borrowed the RTAB tool from Syncro Design Works I was going to have to try figure this out on my own. At first I attempted to rig up a press on the outer ring of the RTAB using my 3-jaw puller which was more complicated than you would think. This did work quite effectively but annoyingly there wasn't much space in the jaws for how deep the press was so I had to use a somewhat flimsy grease cap to try push on the outer ring. This worked for about half the press then it completely crushed itself so I aborted before any pressure was applied to the bearing's inner race. Unfortunately I didn't manage to snap any pictures during this operation so all I have is this photo of where I had to stop: Luckily I have a mate who has a bearing press anyway so I wasn't completely out of options. This was an easy option for me as my Rear Trailing Arm was out of the car as part ...

///M3 CS (ClubSport) Badging

As part of the overall theme of my car build I have wanted to set my car apart from other less modified or standard E46 M3s whilst staying true to a BMW styling. I wanted the car to look like it could have come off the factory floor as a BMW option package and drive well on the street, whilst also tearing up on the track. This is part of why for most of my build I have referred to it as a Clubsport build and this gave me the idea to try capture that naming and apply it to the theme of the car. There was never officially a BMW E46 M3 Clubsport as the BMW E46 M3 CS that Europe got was actually a Coupe Sport and obviously the CSL was the pinnacle model which as discussed previously I cannot really replicate from. So I started thinking about badging and labeling and was reminded of some of the M3Forum guys with Supercharged M3s who use a CSL badge but switch it around to give themselves a ///M3 sc which I always thought was kind of cool and set them apart without being too tacky. The use o...