How to Identify a TRW or ZF Power Steering Rack in 1993-98 Volkswagen Jetta

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If you need to replace inner tie rods, or if you want to replace your whole steering rack, it's important to find which rack you have. Most of these '93 to '98 Jettas and Golfs have two different possible steering racks, and I believe it has to do with the engine and transmission. I believe most of the 2.0-liter manual transmissions have a TRW rack, and I think the V6 with automatic transmission have a ZF rack, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

You can figure out which rack you have by coming into the engine compartment. You'll need a flashlight, and I'm going to try and show you. Right there, where that arrow appears pointing to that black tube kind of running in the picture, running up and down, that is the part of your rack that you want to look at. That is the steering rack, and you can see it's fairly smooth in this car. This is the TRW rack, and I'm going to go underneath just to show you better.

Now I'm going up from underneath, and this is just to better show you. You don't really have to get underneath to see, but here's the rack. You can see here's the boot that goes over the tie rod joint of the inner tie rod, and, again, this is a TRW, so this body is smooth right here. If I were to clean this all off, it's nice and smooth.

The ZF rack, when you look down here, you'll see it. One, it'll be aluminum, but it will be dirty, so it may be kind of hard to tell that it's aluminum, and then it will have a cross hatch raised pattern on it, and I don't have one here to show you, but I can show you a kind of example, here on this aluminum here. It's really tough to see, but here, you can see where I kind of cleaned off with my finger, there is a cross hatch pattern. Now, this is very small. The cross hatch pattern on the ZF, on the body of the rack, the cross hatch pattern will be much larger, where these are probably a quarter of a centimeter by maybe a half centimeter, and the cross hatch pattern on the body here will be over a centimeter, or probably more like a half inch by half inch.

You'll see a cross hatch pattern kind of like that, not that you can really tell what that is, but like I said, there'll be a large cross hatch pattern, and if you were to clean this off, it would be aluminum, which is more gray or silver, as opposed to this. This is black underneath, so again, TRW is smooth black; ZF, if you clean it off, it will be silver or gray with a raised cross hatch pattern on it. Again, just to reiterate, you can see the rack from the top, looking down right through here. You'll see it right there. Again, right there where the arrow is pointing, that is the part of your rack you'll want to look at. If it's smooth, as in this picture, it's manufactured by TRW. If you see a raised cross hatch pattern, you have the one manufactured by ZF.

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