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What's going on everybody? Welcome back for another technicians Tuesday. This week has been pretty calm, so today we are going to be talking about steering cylinders
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Specifically, we will be rebuilding a Mercury Verado hydraulic steering cylinder. Like all hydraulic steering cylinders, they are serviceable to a point
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The biggest difference between a Verado steering cylinder and others such as a U-Flex or the most common
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a C-Star steering cylinder, is that all of the moving components and rams are built in internally inside of the cylinder
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Unlike the C-star cylinders, which has the ram outside and exposed to the elements
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which can damage the cylinder ram and then in turn damage the seals causing them to leak
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So if you're going to be deciding whether or not you need to run, replace or if you can rebuild your steering cylinder, the biggest factor is to inspect the steering
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ram itself. If it has pitting or scratches on it like this, where you can take your fingernail and
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while moving over the mark catch your nail, then you can try and sand it out with some fine
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320 or 400 grit emery cloth, but ultimately it will catch the seal on the cap and destroy it
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At the same time, 100 bucks for some in caps and seals or an $800 ram, if you can sand it out
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and get another season, go for it. On these varado cylinders, though, that isn't the issue. The issue
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with these is that on the inside, the rubber seals deteriorate and begin to leak. Then due to the
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high pressure of the power steering system it will push the fluid out of the cylinder and into the engine bracket down into the water This is the most common location for a leak and the determining factor in finding it I plan on making another video for troubleshooting this but in the quick and short for today
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you basically just take the steering cylinder off of the engine and look inside
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If you see fluid, the cylinder is leaking and it's time to rebuild it
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You can begin the disassembly process by breaking the incaps free while on the engine
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But most of the time when it's time to be rebuilt, they need to be removed, put in a vice, and have massive amounts of heat applied to get them to break free
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Sometimes you can get lucky though and using an impact in this tool here to break them free, they will come out
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I'm guessing if you have a snap-on three-quarter-inch impact, you can break them free pretty easily
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But I don't know by you, but those things cost like a thousand bucks. And I ain't got that kind of cash laying around, so the half-inch DeWalt works great for me
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So before getting into taking the caps off, we want to take all of the fittings out
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The bleeder valves and also the 290s that are on the front of the cylinder, remember there's still fluid inside of the cylinder
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And we want to try and drain out as much as we can, and then with the cylinder and a vice, we'll use an oxyacetylite torch to apply enough heat to get the locktight and rubber seals on the inside of the cylinder to melt freeing up the end cap
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Make sure you aren't using a torch that is set up for cutting the welding
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We just want to get the temperature up so we can hit it with the impact and free it up
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Be careful not to touch anything once it's all hot. But after all of our parts cool down, we can pull the ends off and then sometimes the inside ram will come out with one of the caps
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If not just pull it out and we can then inspect all of the parts If you notice this cap here on the end of it is all scratched up
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And the inside of the housing here is also all scratched up. This is where those O rings sit
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So if you notice this, these will usually leak not long after they have been rebuilt
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In this case, these parts are not reusable. We also want to inspect the inside ram while we are cleaning up all of our parts too
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Looking for any kinds of fitting, rusting, fitting, rusting, or scratching that is on the ram where the rubber seal inside of the
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end cap rides. If it has marks, then the cylinder will also fail not long after being
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rebuilt from this as well. After cleaning all of our parts and getting them set up, we can
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remove the old pieces from the incaps. Looking inside of the caps here, you can tell if the
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cylinder has been rebuilt before or not. If the seals on the inside are orange, then they
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are the original seals and it has not been rebuilt. If they are green, then we need to be built
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know it has been rebuilt before and we want to double check everything to figure out why it
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has failed again. But taking the seals out is pretty simple. For the bottom piece, just look at it
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and you will notice that it has a split in it. Just hold that with your finger and then about a third
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of the way away from where you are holding it, take an angled pick and pry it out from the back
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until you can slide the pick in behind it and pop it out. Simple as that. For the seal on the top
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on the one that has been rebuilt, just stick the pick in behind it and pull it out
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These are just super easy. Now for the original orange ones though, these you have to scrape out
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using the pick and it can get pretty tedious. So we just work our way around it until we get all
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of it out. Pull off the two o-rings from the outside and we can clean the caps up for one last
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time and then put them back together Assembly is super easy as well The most important thing here is to make sure this rubber seal goes in properly We want the lipped portion to be facing towards the inside of the cylinder in cap Just like the direction say Simply push in the bottom part and then the rubber
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piece as well. Then look at the O rings, there's a large one and a small one. We just push
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them on and that's it. Now we can put the cylinder back together. We'll use some steering fluid to loop up the seals and the O-rings, then put the ram into one of the end caps
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Then just slide the whole thing back into the cylinder housing and hand tighten it up
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Put the other end cap on and we can put it back in the vise and torque down the end caps
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The torque specs for these caps is 200 foot pounds. Once the caps are torqued down, we can paint the cylinder if you want and then put the fittings back in
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which is going to close out our day here for this week's Technicians Tuesday
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Thanks for hanging out with us, and for those of you that are rebuilding your cylinders, good luck
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and we hope this helps you get your steering system back up and running. If it's helped, hit that like button for us
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And if you are new to the channel, click the subscribe button and get the bell on
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We make a new Technicians Tuesday video every week at 445 Eastern Standard Time
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We cover all kinds of outboard and boating projects, and we also have a bunch of helpful boating articles on our website
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at born again boating.com. You can also connect with us there. Now enjoy your Tuesday night
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and we'll see you next week
