Broken Serp belt due to ceased power steering pump

[jcarron2]

Hi All,

Looking to see if this is perhaps a common issue. Yesterday upon a cold start, I idled for about 30 seconds, then left the parking garage where I usually park. About 2 minutes later, the battery light illuminates. A few things come to mind, but as I am pulling over into a tim's I notice I've lost power steering as well.

I poped the hood, and could smell a bit of oil and burned rubber scent. I noticed the top of the engine plastic covering had oil sprayed on it... thought that was kind of odd, but didn't know what else to think at the time, and figured I just needed a new serp belt. Anyways, when I pulled all the junk out of the way and started to look closer, upon inspection, I realized my power steering pump actually hard locked. I can move the pully about 1/16th of a turn in either direction, but that's it. Won't budge beyond that. It seems that whatever happened inside, must be pretty interesting, and it actually made the reservoir overflow, or prehaps pressurize quickly, which resulted in the power steering fluid spraying the top of the engine down out of the small breather hole in the cap! WOW...!

Is this a common failure? For what it's worth, the fluid level is down a a bit, but still up to the mark... And I'd recently flushed the fluid this past summer.

When I had my pump fail in my E46, it simply sheered the shaft internally, but this seems to have failed in a totally different manner.

I am not sure if the pump self destructed, and perhaps send metal filings into the rack as well in the process ?

Any thoughts?

I am going to try and back flush the rack, and swap the pump and hope for the best... just not sure how it failed ...with such epic proportions.

anyone else had this happen? Was the rack and pinion ok afterwords?

thanks,
Jonathan