This is what you have inside the pressure piston. I had to borrow this pic as my camera decided to play silly buggers at this stage
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Some pumps will have 1 or 2 shims as shown, other's wont, my one didn't. If you do have shims then remove one at a time and refit the whole lot to the pump and see how it is, if it gives you what you want, great, if not then you need to shim the spring that controls the pump pressure. basically what you do is get a couple of shims or washers and put them into the piston body then refit the spring, stud, ball bearing and cap. I used a couple of 6mm spring washers as they were a smaller diameter than the piston body, so that I could remove them easily if need be and also they wont restrict the fluid flow.
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I used 2 pair of pliers to remove the "spring" from the washers so that they sit flat, the height of the 2 washers was just under 3mm.
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The linked article says to grind off part of the stud to prevent it blocking fluid flow but I found that even with the spring fully compressed, the stud is still shorter than the spring so there is no way it can block off the fluid flow so I left the stud as it was.
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Now fit everything back together, be carefull as there is now a lot more spring pressure on the retaining cap and it can be a bit of a pig to get it back in.
Refit everything to the pump, top up the fluid, start the engine and let it run to bleed any air out and to make sure you have no leaks.
Ok, time for a test run. Well, there was a slight increase in power assist but nowhere near as much as I was expecting, or hoping for,,, however, what I did find was the steering was a lot smoother, and no longer suffers from "kick back" when driving round a bend on a rough surface so it was much nicer to drive and the self centering action was a lot better than before so definately some improvement, but I still wanted it lighter so I thouyght I'd have a go at stretching the main spring that the piston rests against in the pump, although I didn't hold out much hope for any improvement to be honest. The spring in my pump was just under 2 inches long so I stretched it to 2 and a half inches, fitted it back in the pump and went for a drive,,,
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Whoa, thats more like it now, a noticable improvement in the lightness of the steering, I can one finger it now quite comfortably under normal driving, and, there's no loss of road feel at all. So all in all, not too bad a result for 30 minutes work.
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