Hard Steering

I have a 2000 Taurus 3.0. The steering is very hard. Sometimes while turning the steering wheel with the engine running, fluid will squirt out the vent hole on the reservoir cap. The only time I've ever seen that on these cars is when you turn the wheel with the engine off. It's almost as if the pump isn't pumping. The pulley and shaft are turning on the pump and the pump is whining like it is low on fluid or like there is air in the system. Any ideas?

Sounds like there is either some sort of obstruction or the pump is shot. I'd try to figure out if the pump is actually circulating fluid through the steering system hoses. (look at my two other ideas below first) I think if you pull one of the cooling lines off the front cooling loop and have someone carefully and slowly turn the steering wheel to see if any fluid comes out. If I'm not mistaken, the line that is just clamped to the bottom of the reservoir is the return line from the cooling loop. You can remove it from there, but wherever you make the disconnection, you will need to some how plug it or clamp shut an open hose or whatever to not loose the fluid out of the reservoir. You also don't want to completely drain out the reservoir to not hurt the pump.

There may be a check valve on the high pressure side of the pump that's a metal line at the pump to the rack that may be stuck and not letting fluid through, or you have a bunch of sludge in the bottom of the reservoir plugging things up. Some have a screen at the bottom that has plugged up. If that's the case, you may as well do a full fluid flush and exchange, which an explaination for can be found with the search function at the top of the Taurus page.

Hopefully, anything I've described that's off, someone else will set straight. Let us know your progress and solution! :D

Thanks, tripledaddy. It turns out that it had air in the system, because the rack was leaking. You couldn't see the leak on the outside, but the bellows looked kind of blown up and deformed, so I took the clamp off the end of one and powersteering fluid began to drain out. I put a new rack on it this morning, filled and blead the system and now it steers great.