Club 80-90 Forums

Does anyone have any experience with getting a power steering rack rebuilt?
Mine is leaking so the plan is to remove it and have it reconditioned. I have a choice of seals kits for the rebuilt, brickwerks aftermarket at under £30 or €90 for a NOS VW kit from classic.

I would hope for this fix to last another 20-30yrs so leaning towards the kit from classic. What do you think?

Kiley and Clinton in Birmingham will do the whole job, with the correct tools, test and guarantee it.

PS its the same kit as an early E30 afaik

The kit that vw sell is aftermarket quality, if you scroll down to the details you will see, so its most likely the same as Brickwerks sell but with a load of VW tax added .

Brickworks kit is not a complete kit. It ismissing some nylon bushes.

The seal kit was originally made by ZF, whom made the steering rack.
We used to have the ZF kit.
The ZF kit is now obsolete.
We then bought them from Classic parts, same contents, same bag, same marking, same thing.
They then went obsolete from VW Classic parts so we now buy them from JP group.
A few years ago we had a comment that they had one wrong seal in, one complaint, one seal kit.
We've had no other reports of issues or missing parts.
When JP started selling them they did come in the same grey bag that the original ZF ones came in and the same grey bag that the Classic parts ones came in with the ZF label removed.
We could continue to buy them from Classic but as noted they are 3 times the price and are listed from VW Classic Parts as "Aftermarket Part" so with an educated guess they are one and the same thing.
We choose to buy the JP kit, sell it at sensible money and I believe it a case of it's those or nothing, whatever they are branded are I think that they are the same.
VW - 251 498 020
Lemfoerder (part of ZF group) 14381 01
JP Group 1144350610