The 280CE came back for a visit this week complaining of groaning power steering. Turned out that the belt was slipping once the wheel got toward full lock. On further inspection, the belt had become too loose – not because it was stretched, but because the bolt that allows the belt adjustment had lost its threads in the critical area and it was slowly adjusting itself outwards.
The lost threads meant that it was also impossible to remove the nut to replace the bolt. Luckily the power steering pump is fairly accessible from below (especially with a hoist), so the nut could be cut off with very careful use of an angle grinder.
the picture above shows the situation rather well. As can be seen the pump can move to tension the belt but the bolt was not tightening properly allowing it to work loose. The bolt has a little cog at the end so only one side of the bolt needs to be tightening to tension the belt. We didn’t have one of these so a conventional bolt was used for now and a new bolt will be ordered.
After a test drive full operation of the steering has been restored.
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