How to Replace Power Steering Pump 2006-11 Toyota Camry

Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!

Before you move the power steering pump you need to drain the fluid from the reservoir. It won't slide off the bracket, so I'm going to unbolt the bracket and the reservoir and just pull it out of the vehicle and drain it out. I need to disconnect the feed and return lines so I have better access here. I can actually slide the coolant bottle up and off the bracket, and I'll just put it aside over here. Take some slip joint pliers, squeeze the clamps, move those down. Now, I'm doing this because when I remove this larger hose, that's the low pressure line going to the pump. By having this reservoir empty, I won't have as much power steering fluid pouring out at the bottom. I'm going to loosen the 10mm bolts that are holding it to the body; there's three of them. Some low clearance here, so use a 10mm ratcheting wrench. All right. That bolt will just stay in there.

Now I need to pull those lines off. I'm going to put a rag underneath, and try to catch anything that spills. Try to tilt this up as best I can. See if this hose wants to come off. How it wants to come off. This one's a little tighter, so I'm going to use a small pick and try to break that seal. Okay. Now we can just dispose of this old fluid in a proper manner.

Use a large pry bar or flat-bladed screwdriver to remove the wheel cover. Just kind of slide it between the wheel and the plastic and pop it off. These lug nuts are a 21mm socket. Going to use that and a breaker bar to loosen them while the vehicle is on the ground. Going to raise and support the vehicle. We're using a two post lift but you can use a jack and jack stands. The lug nuts are loose. I can take my socket and finish removing them. Just going to hold onto the wheel. When I take the last lug nut off it's going to be loose, we don't want to drop it. If we drop the lug nut that's okay, I just don't want the wheel to fall.

We need to remove the belt by compressing the tensioner. It's up here, and there is a 14mm bolt on the end of the pulley. I'll put a wrench on, try to compress this spring, and pop the belt off the power steering pulley. There. I'll get the wrench on here and try to get some extra leverage; use this pipe. I don't know if this is going to work. Try. So for now I'm just going to leave the belt in place, and I'll remove it afterwards, once the power steering pump is swapped. I've got a drain pan in place because I'm going to remove the clamp from this low pressure hose at the bottom of the pump. It's already loose at the top so the whole hose might come out, but just for ease, I need to get to a banjo bolt that's behind it.

I'm going to pull this clamp up and pull the hose off of the pump. Just using some slip joint pliers to compress this clamp; pull it up. Work this hose up and off. So, the whole hose is going to kind of fall out because it's not connected to the reservoir at the top, so I'm just going to feed it out just so it's not in the way. We can reinstall it afterwards. Next thing that I need to remove is this banjo fitting on the high pressure line. It's right at the top of the pump. It's a 17mm bolt. Going to loosen that and pull it off. Now I've broken this free with the wrench. It's finger tight, and I'm just going to pull it out.

I'll put this banjo bolt in a safe place because I need to reuse it. Going to separate the high pressure fitting from the pump. It does have a gasket. It's sort of a U-shape type gasket that's clipped over. So I'm just going to take it off now so I don't forget to take it off later. We'll have new gaskets to install with it, so we're not going to reuse this. I can put the line up just out of the way. Still have our drain pan here because it's going to drip. Now we can unbolt the pump from the side of the engine. Working through the pulley, because now we can spin it with the belt off of there. There’s a lower bolt, and then opposite is right there. There's a lower bolt here and then opposite of it there is an upper bolt.

Basically, if you line the pulley up like this, the top hole you'll be able to access the upper bolt, and the bottom hole is the lower bolt. They are 14mm. I'm going to use a combination of a short socket and a short extension because the frame rail is close. So I'm going to go for the lower one right now. That one's coming free. Very good. Now I'm going to work on the top one. Hopefully I can get the ratchet in there. I might have to actually ... sometimes if you put the ratchet into the pulley, the opening in the pulley, and then slide the pulley up, it's a little bit easier. There's not a lot of clearance. I've broken it free, the clearance is just real tight. The wrench is basically just up against the frame rail. I've got it free. I'm going to switch to a shorter ratchet so it's easier to maneuver. I just needed the leverage of the longer ratchet to break it loose. So, I've got these pretty loose, and I'm just using my fingers and the extension and the socket to finish removing the bolts.

The bolts are loose on the power steering pump, but it seems like it corroded a bit to the engine where it attaches, so I'm going to use a small pry bar and try to break it free. The bolt holes in the bracket that are holding the power steering pump to the engine, are slotted. I think they've corroded a bit, so I'm going to spray some penetrating oil. Okay, so to get this pump out, this bolt has to stay in here because the frame rail is in the way, it can't be pulled out. You can see the bottom hole is just like the top hole. It's got a slot in it. The bolt is going to slide out. It has some corrosion here, just from age, and there's a little bit of corrosion on the bolt. If you can keep the bolts on the shoulder part, where it's a little bit thinner than on the threaded part, and I'm going to push on the bolt and try to wiggle the pump at the same time, it will slide right off the ears. And then we can pull the pump right down and out of the vehicle.

The power steering pump is sitting in this bracket on the side of the engine. The bolts are going through and they're threading into here. Because of this frame rail that's in the way, when we install the pump and remove the pump. The bolts need to be unthreaded, but at the same time they sit in this bracket. And if you're over here, you've got them all the way out, they don't want to come out with the threads. It's too thick. If you slide the bolt in just a little bit so it's in the shoulder part, they'll slide right out. And that's how you remove the pump. It's kind of tricky. It's kind of hard to see with the pump in here, so we're trying to give you a good idea to help you out to get this pump out of here.

Here's our old pump. Here's our new pump. With the old one out of the vehicle now, I can move the pulley and push the bolt out. Swap that over to our new one when we're ready. Working at the new one, you need to swap this power steering pressure switch out. Ours actually broke while we were trying to fiddle with it to get it out, so we're going to end up replacing that switch. I'm going to ignore it for now. You just swap over this middle hard line and the seal. It's got a 10mm, sorry, it has a 12mm bolt here. Try to break this free. I may have to put this in the vise. I was able to get that free. It's going into the pump. I'm just going to grab it. Just wiggle it back and forth to pull it out. We're basically done with this pump. There's nothing else on it we need, so I'm just going to put it away.

On our new pump I'm going to remove this protective cap, push this line in, and install the old bolt. It's just going into an aluminum housing, so I'm just going to get it tight and then stop. Since we broke our sensor on our old pump, we're going to install a brand new one onto the new pump. I'm going to pop this protective cap out. Our new pressure sensor has a new O-ring on it. Just going to thread it right in. It's really difficult to change in the car, so it's much easier to do out here.

We'll take a 19mm wrench, and just tighten it down. It's just a brass piece going in aluminum. I'm just going to get it tight and just stop. I don't want to over tighten it. I'm going to take our old bolts and a wire brush, just try to clean them up a little bit so they slide in easier. Basically just knocking off the high spots of corrosion. This'll make it easier for the bolts to go over those ears on the bracket. The bolts go into these two spots here. There's an extra one here that's for another application. Put one bolt through. Put the other bolt through. This is ready to go back in the car.

We'll take some white lithium grease, and I'm going to put it on the ears where the bolts slide into. Just sort of help them slide in there because there is some corrosion. Don't need a whole lot of it, but just make it a little bit easier. I'm going to leave this protective cap on here just for now, so that nothing falls in there. This should be okay. I'm going to put this into the engine compartment. I'm going to push these bolts out. I'm going to slide them over the ears.

So actually, they need to sit just like that because the back of the bracket is going to fit like this, and those little ears are going to go over these bolts. And I'm going to hang it. I'll move the pulley, and tighten up the bolts. Maneuver the pump in. Okay. Switch hands. Push this up out of the way the high pressure line.

Now, our low pressure line is totally out of the vehicle, so that's why you don't see it and it's not in the way. So I've got these bolts pushed out. I'm going to get them up on those little ears. Get the pump in here square. I've got the top one into the mount and into the slot, and now what I'm going to try to do is capture it in some of the threads so that I can work the other bolt down without popping this one out of the slot that it's sitting in. I'm going to just tighten up this bolt. Not fully tighten it. Just get enough threads caught on it that it won't want to pop out of position.

Pull this ratchet back out. I can still move this around. Now I need to get this down into the bottom one, just like that. Get the socket into this one, and get that started. I'm just going to use the 1/4" drive and just get these as tight as I can go. That feels good. Get the top one. I'm going to plug back in the electrical connector for the pressure switch. Push on it ‘til it clicks.

Next thing is, I'm going to do the high pressure line. The banjo fitting for the high pressure line is going to get two new crush gaskets. The original one, they were connected together like a "U", so it went around the banjo fitting so it was a lot easier to install. So these will be a little bit trickier.

I'm going to put the top one on first. We'll go through the banjo fitting. Let's see this here. That's going to sit just like that. I've got this cap halfway loose; I'm going to pull that out and discard it. I need to put the other copper crush gasket onto the bolt carefully. This little straight piece is going to lock against the part that it threads into, so the line won't rotate on you, but it's going to sit flush like that. And I'm going to make sure I thread it in by hand the banjo bolt so it doesn't cross thread. Get it all the way threaded down.

So that wasn't too bad. That went in pretty easily. I didn't lose the two gaskets, got it fairly tight with my fingers. Take the 17mm wrench and I'm going to tighten that down. That one doesn't fit very well, so I'll go this way with it. I can actually watch the copper gaskets crush. That's what's going to create the seal. That's getting tighter. Now I'm going to slide the power steering, the low pressure hose, back up into the engine compartment. Pull this cap out, put our hose back over the line. Take the slip joint pliers, reinstall the clamp.

Since the belt is already loose, we're going to remove it and replace it with a new one. Slide our new belt down and in. Going to try to capture the power steering pump pulley first. It's way at the back. Just a matter of feeding it back there. I'm going to reach over the engine and out the back. I've still got this low pressure line disconnected so it's a little easier to see back here. Get that down and kind of lay it on the pulley. Then we put around the tensioner, over the water pump, around the A/C compressor. If it's loose and kind of seems like it's flopping around, I'm not too worried about it right now. We're just going to get it in place. So that's sort of where I want it there.

Need to work on getting it over the power steering pump pulley again. So now that we've got it routed, this goes down around the power steering pump pulley, over the tensioner pulley, around the crank pulley, and it goes around the crank pulley, then around the A/C compressor, then up the flat side, touches the water pump pulley, then finally it will go over the alternator; that'll be the last pulley. There is a 19mm, like a hexagonal sort of stud here on the tensioner. Going to put a breaker bar and a 19mm socket on there and that way I can push it down to release the tensioner. If I can pull the belt up and over, then I can release it. Then pull these rags out of here.

Going to reinstall the reservoir. Get the smaller hose on first. Push the larger hose on. Get this bolt started. Install the other bolts. Take the slip joint pliers and reinstall the clamps where they need to be. Put our coolant reservoir back.

Now it's time to fill the system with the correct power steering fluid, then bleed it. Going to fill up the reservoir to the max fill level. Going to start it, let it run. After you turn the car on, move the steering wheel back and forth to bleed the system. And when all the air bubbles are gone, check your fluid level and top off if needed.

Reinstall our wheel. Important to note, these lug nuts have a taper. Taper meets the wheel, matches the inside of the wheel. Don't install them with the flat side like this—that is incorrect. Install them with the taper to the wheel. It helps locate the wheel on the lug nut stud. I'm just using a socket and ratchet to bring these down snug before I put the car on the ground. Going to torque the lug nuts to 76 foot pounds. I'm going in a cross pattern. Reinstall the hub cap. Got to line up the opening for the valve stem with the valve stem on the wheel. Just push it in place.

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