02 3.5SE weird steering problem

[t.mcginley.jr]

Hi everyone,

New to the Altima section, but I've been in the Z forum for a few years now. Anyway, I just picked up a 2002 Altima 3.5SE 5-spd as my daily driver. It has 106k miles on it. The PO told me it had a power steering leak, which I haven't yet had a chance to verify.

When you go to take a turn, it alternates between hard to turn and easy. In other words as you're making a turn, it will be hard, then get easy, then hard again, then easy. I've seen other threads where peoples just had to lube up their steering u-joints, but I did that with some good teflon lube and it made no difference. My P/S reservoir is full of ATF, there is something leaking on the pass. side of the engine but I haven't verified if it's oil or ATF (from the power steering).

Anyone heard of something like this? Could it be a leaky high pressure line?

[t.mcginley.jr]

For anyone looking for info it turned out to be a bad intermediate steering shaft. The U-joint on it gets rusty and causes it to bind up, even if it doesn't look that rusty from the outside. Dorman sells an updated design one for ~$80 on rockauto.com that apparently prevents future binding problems. The leak I talked about is from the notorious oil cooler gasket. Coincidentally Dorman makes the replacement oil cooler seals too, its pretty easy to change.