I tried everything to relieve the noise coming from the F150 I6 power steering pump. I jacked the front of the truck up, rotated the steering wheel many times, and flushed out the gear box, lines, and reservoir. Nothing changed but the color of the fluid. The owner’s manual called for Ford Type F ATF fluid, but the cap on the pump says power steering fluid and I am sure that is why the fluid was brown(it was a mix of both). Type F is red in color. Therefore, the fluid was now red, yet the pump still sounded like an angry cat caught in the engine when I turned the steering wheel.

Even though the pump was not leaking, I decided to change it to see if that would relieve some noise. The repair manual was a bit vague in that it said the power steering pump mount was a two piece affair. It was not! It was one piece, and that is what made the repair work more time consuming and difficult. I had to remove the air conditioning compressor from the mounting bracket and position it back away from the bracket that also holds the power steering pump.

The work was not all that difficult, but it sure was time consuming. The nuts and bolts were hard to get at. I removed the serpentine belt, and upper radiator hose to give myself more working room. I also removed the pump’s pressure and return fluid lines. Below the A/C compressor I found two bolts and two nuts that needed removing. The nuts held the power steering bracket to two studs mounted to the engine block, which allowed the bracket proper positioning. After removing three more mounting bracket bolts on the top side of the engine, I was able to take the power steering pump and bracket assembly away from the inline 6 engine.

Now the pump was easy to remove from the bracket. I used my pulley removal tool to remove the pump’s pulley and to install the pulley on the new pump. There is an Amazon link to the required pulley removal tool after the video below. I cleaned a bit of the old grease from the engine and the pump bracket before I put everything back together.

The Inline 6 engine sounded much better with the new power steering pump. The pump has a 500 mile break-in time so I expect it to get even better sounding as time passes. This repair would have been much easier if I had removed the radiator instead of the pump bracket. I then could have replaced the power steering pump on the engine and saved myself a bunch of work.