Alright Joel,
…When it comes to diagnosing and fixing vehicles, I tend to scour the internet whether it be forums, a bit of YouTube, etc. and try to weed out those who are firing off the parts cannon from those who have a reasoned and methodical approach. In other words, I'm trying to find "that guy" who knows what he's talking about. In this case, that's you!
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Yo John, glad it helped. FWIW, I’m a guy digging for reviews just like you are. I have a mental list of

authors whose opinions I treat as gold, so I’m trying to add to the knowledge base and push the envelope just a bit further. Even as forums slowly dwindle, they’re still the best knowledge base that I know of. I don’t want to see them die (part of why I’m doing this).
I ran across this meme right after finally solving the engine headaches and it got a good laugh from me.
Time to talk steering…
If you read this whole thread you might remember that I’ve been living with a power steering leak for 3 years or so. I tried swapping o-rings a couple times but that didn’t solve it. Note, I was using viton for chemical resistance whereas one gent noted good ol’ Buna-N might have be a bit more forgiving. Details of the prior attempts here:
https://www.naxja.org/forum/showpost.php?p=246660166&postcount=488
Well, the leak was getting pretty bad. This was after a recent run on a dusty road.
The sketchy part was that even with the fluids topped off and re-bleed, I could outdrive the assist. When hauling booty on a winding dirt road, if I had a quick change of direction, I could feel the assist go away and come back. It’s pretty freaky when it tries to put you on a new line and/or suddenly the steering effort is 5 times what it was.
So I decided, screw it. I’m planning on keeping this jeep even if I eventually finish my crazy FJ40. Steering has always been a weak point so I ended up buying PSC’s pump and reservoir kit for the XJ.
https://www.pscmotorsports.com/psc-pk1852.html
The main thing that I wanted was a bigger/better pump. If I was running out of assist, I figured it’s possible the flow rate couldn’t keep up with the demand I was putting on things sawing the wheel around. Also possible that I was seeing cavitation or a big bubble burping out of the system. Either way it wasn’t getting ‘er done. I’ve been through 3 remanufactured pumps at this point so I wanted some brand new parts and PSC seemed to check all the boxes.
The pump in the PK1852 kit is this one:
https://www.pscmotorsports.com/psc-sp32362jp.html It is all new and has a bigger displacement which is rad. I’d have preferred a direct mount reservoir for simplicity but I can live with the remote mounting (or so I thought). This power steering pump review was pretty helpful.
https://www.naxja.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1143323
Note, the pump does mount with only 2 of the 3 original “through” bolts to the intake manifold. The physically larger bore size precludes the top bolt landing. Instead the 3rd bolt threads into a blind hole in the top of the pump housing.
PSC doesn’t give you this new top bolt which is a bit lame considering the cost of the kit. I believe it’s an m8 x 1.25 – 20 mm, which thankfully I had, so not that big a deal.
What IS a big deal, is the reservoir placement that PSC is using. I didn’t quite realize this when I bought the kit. PSC doesn’t offer installations instructions, instead you only get “installation tips” in the box. Which is this:
https://www.pscmotorsports.com/pub/media/pdf/reservoir_tips.pdf
The placement of the reservoir in the PK1852 kit violates quite a few of the tips they give you!
WTF?!? Seriously?
Yep. For posterity, here’s the current install instructions with every “tip” highlighted that the kit’s designers broke by putting the reservoir so far from the pump.
The reservoir mounts to the brake booster so almost on the firewall. It makes sense that this could starve if you do any kind of steep climb.
The placement lands under a hood rib so it’s lower than it needed to be.
The run is close to 16” long (another no no).
The final deal breaker for me is that it PSC’s placement lands right in the middle of the of my air intake. Now sure, there’s no reason why PSC would design around someone else’s intake (AFE in this case), but it still sucks and because they don’t have install instructions I could check out in advance I had no idea.
That said, in doing some poking around after I’d purchased the parts I’m not sure their mounting works for us at all.
Here’s a user with some pretty harsh things to say about using their reservoir mount position.
https://www.naxja.org/forum/showpost.php?p=246253406&postcount=282
https://www.naxja.org/forum/showpost.php?p=246255964&postcount=283
I don’t know if the kit has been updated since this was written in 2008.
I almost returned the whole damn thing. However, shipping to and from Hawaii is so expensive that a return just kills me and these are obviously nice parts… so I decide to take the hard road and do a custom reservoir placement instead.
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And proceed to not deal with it for about a year since I had too many projects and I wasn’t excited about dealing with this. Anyone else been there?
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But then hey, look-ie here… Say one has a nasty exhaust leak and you need to yank the PS pump to swap a header anyways? If you’re that guy and you have some PS goodies on the shelf, then of course it would be enough inspiration to jump back into this.
I looked at half a dozen placements. My wildest idea was welding two fittings together to try for a direct mount solution and make my own “integrated reservoir” (too high and brackets would be complex). I was ready to cut down the reservoir itself like the gent linked above to get the reservoir higher but it wasn’t enough. Nothing wanted to fit and the big 12 AN fittings that PSC gave me have gentle bends for flow that aren’t conducive to close mounting, especially if I end up have to chassis mount this and need to account for engine motion. I wanted to get it into the front corner but I couldn’t make it land and going outboard drops the height too.
Anyways, here’s the solution I eventually came up with… I notched the corner out of my AFE airbox:
I’d forgotten that the box was steel… Why a shield needs to be as heavy as the AFE piece and isn’t made from aluminum, I have no idea, but at least it was easy to weld to and I don’t care enough about the weight to remake it. Not shown, some edge trim for the reservoir to sit on at the horizontal cut.
The fittings that PSC gave me aren’t going to work anymore but thankfully I have some stuff lying around that I can make work. As noted, the feed line is -12 AN and I used a 60 degree bend and a straight plus some actual braided line to make my own line.
By the way, PSC no longer lists a phone number on their website, but I just noticed that the description of the PK1852 on their site has a little nugget about XJs that states “The
PK1852X upgrade is only applicable for 1997-2002 TJ/XJ.”
If you want to try this and you have the right years, you should call and talk to PSC and find out what that “X” designation means. Oh, but you can’t call them since they no longer list their phone number on the website. Yay! So you have it, here’s the contact info that you get on an invoice.
PSC Motorsports,
P. O. Box 926
Azle, TX 76098
PH 817-270-0102
I spoke to PSC several times throughout this process. One challenge is that no matter what I do the pump on a XJ is mounted fairly high so I was gonna violate their recommendation on avoiding a flat feed hose. I was at least able to confirm that hydraulic head pressure still matters so as long as the fluid surface is above the pump, I should be okay (even though it’s pretty much a direct copy of their top left pic on “examples of what NOT to do”)
One downside of my placement is that the PS and fuel lines are fighting each other a bit. I try to go flex the steel fuel hardline by a few degrees by hand and I fell spray and hear a hiss. Are you kidding me? Nope, I just cracked my fuel line. I probably should have bleed pressure before messing with it (or used a bending tool rather than by hand). Hindsight.
No one has one on island, but thankfully summit carries the MOPAR replacement and my rig is already down with the stupid engine issues I noted above. I paid my penance and bought a new one.
At some point I mounted the optional splash vent to the side of the air box shield with some little spacers as well.
End results:
Hey, am I ready to drive this thing? I take it for a spin around the block (still running crappy as it was right before I launched into smoke testing) and it feels normal, albeit I’m not driving hard enough where I might have run out of assist prior.
Park it back in the garage… Next morning there’s a big ass puddle of PS fluid on the ground, naturally it’s the expensive Swepco 715 stuff this time... Crap. Turns out that my steering box was leaking in addition to the reservoir puking fluid. Looks like I’m gonna get to address the box too…
So that’s at least the saga of the flaw in the PK1852 kit and reservoir mounting.
Would their factory mounting work okay? I tend to think it’s a maybe… It does violate a bunch of their rules, but I don’t have any experience to chime on whether you can get away with it or not. If you’ve run it the way PSC intended, please chime in with your thoughts. Between the terrible user feedback I found from 2008 and the conflict with my air intake, I wasn’t going to be the one to find out.
To their credit, PSC is letting me return the unused parts (bracket, fittings, and lines), so kudos on some good customer service there.
There’s a happy ending to this story coming, but we’re not quite there yet.
-Joel