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I cover the Caswell Black Oxide kit in much greater detail 28 minutes into "Galant VR-4 April Progress"    • Galant VR 4 April Progress  

For people with a Galant VR-4, if you can't find a service to rebuild the rack you have, your options are extremely limited except to rebuild it through your own sheer grit and determination and you will have to accept the challenge of chasing down the parts you need for it however you can get them. That's what happened here. The Galant VR-4 has a Koyo rack.

I had the foresight to buy multiple seal kits over the years in an attempt to obtain either the proper Galant VR-4 kit OR some of the rear seals to rebuild this car's rear steering rack with very little success. Both of the aftermarket kits I purchased were listed for the Galant VR-4, but without factory replacement part kit availability, you can only take what you can get. I was gifted with cores to pull parts from for the major components I couldn't re-use. For the non-reusable, if it didn't come in that parts kit, I can't order it from Mitsubishi, so I'm out of luck.

I had to rob bits from other kits and even supply some of my own O-rings to make them complete. I show both kits, but neither kit is complete for this particular rack. One was actually for the non-turbo Galant rack with was different as demonstrated. Fortunately it was similar enough that most of its seals and o-rings worked.

The Mitsubishi Seal Kit part number for this 4WS rack is MB815189

The rack itself is MB532130 and good luck with that.

This car is not coming back with All Wheel Steering. It's coming back instead with the rear axle assembly it truly deserves. What little is still in tact from its rusty dysfunctional AWS hardware will be parts for another all wheel steering system on a different car if it needs it. While all wheel steering is an important part of a Galant VR-4's personality, and an interesting piece of technology, it is not the critical or centerpiece of the Galant VR-4's performance. It works precisely as advertised but its affects are minimal, and it's largely was a sales ploy as well as an answer to Honda's AWS Prelude in the US market. So while this is the correct power steering rack & pinion assembly for a Galant VR-4, the car with 4 wheel steering, it's only going to do two wheels now and the rebuild is 0% different either way. It's well explained in the video.

This would be the same procedure for ALL first generation DSMs, and anything Mitsubishi with a Koyo rack no matter how many wheels it controls. The hydraulic 4WS system used here is the same as the 3000GT VR-4. Koyo makes a high quality power steering rack and they ended up in lots of other great cars, Toyotas, GTR's... but changes that should be very minor may result in major differences even across the same make/model/year as you will see.

The special seal shrinker tool I used is called a MB991317, if you find one, you're lucky. No you can't borrow it.

There are only 6 bolts, 5 nuts, 2 tie rod ends, a seal kit, and 3 washers in 37-050. Beyond that, pretty much every part is named something like cushion, band, clip, pad, bracket, and trying to buy any of that from Mitsubishi is fruitless for this car. You may get lucky with the nuts and bolts, and you may find some things on Rockauto, but if it's not in current production and you can't find it in the aftermarket, and you don't have a core to rob from, then you are going to have to be creative.

The only bolts and nuts I didn't cover in the video are
4 qty. MF241307 Bolt, Steering Gear Washer Assembled M12 x 25 x 1.25mm Grade 7 60-80 Nm or 43-58 Ft-lbs
They hold the rack into the subframe. I put anti-seize on those bolts.

The steering shaft support lock nut ring thing gets 51 foot pounds, but you'll never get a wrench that big that lets you measure that.

The socket/special pinion tool thing has never surfaced in my antique tool searches for 17 years. And now I'm done with this job, replaced it with a rag and a socket, so I think I'll pass on the expense of its novelty if I ever find it. It's gotta hold 1 foot pound. I hope I saved everyone $100 in tools and hours of worry.

This was actually an easier job than making the video about it. It took me about 20 hours of video because of all the cleaning, blasting and painting. No matter how you slice it, if you can find the right rebuilt rack for $300, do that instead. Don't blink. It's true that fixing your own car is putting money back in your own pocket, but on this job you make more per hour doing something else. You gotta either really love the thing or want the challenge. I can say I enjoyed this experience. Just look at it. Major #1229 problem solved. Now we can move on...