New member

New guy from the PNW, I have an st165 with the st215 engine. owned for a little over a year, last owner did the swap. Really wanting to look into solutions for the sloppy steering. anyone tried swapping out the rack?

Can't help you much with steering, I don't remember thinking my st165 was sloppy, but it's been 15 years since I've driven one.

That said, other than the rack - are your bushings, tie rods, etc. in good shape?

And my main reason for posting - welcome to the forum!

Replaced inner/outer tie rods and it felt the same. I'm kind of a newbie for suspension work, don't know how to replace bushings so that might be it. I had heard a few people talk about the steering and how bad it was and assumed everyone's was like that. Finding replacement parts for a different rack would probably be a lot easier though lol

If you are not sure what the source of the problem is, take it to a good place that does alignments. They should be able to tell you the source of the problem. They may not be able to fix it (given they may not have the parts necessary), but they can tell you what it is you need. You can then start a search to try to find the parts needed.

Hey welcome ST165 owner from the Pacific NorthWest! Glad to see you--much respect for those keeping the ST165s on the road. I'm pretty new myself and I've found the folks here friendly and giving with good advice. Not that I have any specific advice relevant to the ST165; I'm an ST185 guy and not steeped up in knowledge yet.

That said, I can Google as well as the next guy. Here are a couple of articles I found by entering "reasons for sloppy steering" :

https://www.moogparts.com/parts-matter/ ... loose.html

https://www.onallcylinders.com/2016/08/ ... ng-issues/

If I had the same situation, I'd take it in and see what an alignment shop had to say about it, like 93celicaconv advises.