misterbork

Hey guys,

This is my first post here, and I really need your help on this one. I was out doing a bit of mudding with a friend of mine in my '96 Tacoma with 225k miles on it. She's a great truck - never had a problem before.

Anyway, I had the RPM's up around 5k before shifts to maintian power through the mud in 4WD, and was doing some fairly tight donuts out in the country. After perhaps 3-5 minutes of messing around, we got back on the road and I got out to do a once around the truck to make sure tires, etc. looked good before getting on the highway.

As soon as I got out I say a bunch of what looked like oil on the driver's side wheel well and on the skid plate area. CHecked the oil - it was fine. THen looked at the P/S pump, and had no fluid. Fluid had covered the entire engine bay and the inside of the hood. I couldnt see any disconnected hoses or anything, and there was no fluid left to see spurting out from the hemorrhage location.

I limped back home, parked and rechecked the oil level which was still fine. Then I looked online at the cost of new high pressure oil lines and stuff and was shocked at the price. I will test tomorrow by putting some more fluid in, and having someone work the steering wheel to see if I can locate the source of the leak myself.

Do any of you have any experience with such a catastrophic failure of the P/S system? What was the cause? What was the solution? And most importantly, what was the COST?

Thanks a ton for any help!

TheFatGuy

I would say to first clean everything is the engine bay and put the front end on jack stands to take the tires off the ground, slowly start to pour the p/s fluid while checking for leaks, have someone turn the steering wheel to remove the air build-up, after this and if no leaks are found turn the truck on and the pressure in the line will show you where the leak is....hopefully its a hose thats bad