Our 2001 Volvo S60 T5 has been parked for a few years now after it just quit running on me one day as I was doing about 75 MPH on the interstate. I think that was a result of the alternator dying and the battery being dead, I’ve never had a car do that to me before, just quit running at speed.
At any rate, I finally got around to paying some attention to it, wanted to get it going again and give it to a relative who needs another car. I believe the alternator quit because it was getting a steady flow of power steering fluid sprayed on it, I tried to “patch” the leak with an innertube, some zip ties, etc., really just attempting to keep it from splashing so much in the engine bay and not really expecting to stop a high pressure leak.
I gave up on the car and just let it sit, but this year I picked back up on it. The high pressure line is not an expensive part but I read up on a lot of horror stories about how much cussing is involved getting the old one out and the new one in, I wanted to avoid that.
I did a bit of research online in the forums, etc. and wasn’t able to find someone talking about successfully patching where this usually leaks. I figured there had to be a way and I luckily stumbled across the perfect part for the job. It is designed to repair high pressure leaks just like this and so far it is holding up like a champ.
This is the part I used, https://www.grainger.com/product/SUR-R-Power-Steering-Hose-Automotive-55AC17
I’m dumping some photos here now but plan to come back to write up the story behind what all I did to fix this.
