How to remove the steering rack from a 355

My steering rack was starting to seep, so I decided to pull it and send it out to be rebuilt.

I looked high and low and couldn't find a write up for remove it, other than a (very handy) 10 step summary by Mitchell (yelcab).

I'm not that great at formatting photos and text, so this tutorial will consist of many posts.

Before I get started, I should warn you that this is an ordeal.

Step one: get your air conditioning system drained (or you could just let it loose, but that would be environmentally unfriendly, and possibly illegal)

Next, remove the carpet from your trunk by pulling the rubber seal off, and removing all of the screws and metal trim pieces holding it down.
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Next, remove the lower carpet. This involves drilling out the rivets that hold the leather tool-kit straps to the car. I've already drilled them in this photo.

The oblong port holes are where the steering rack mounting-bolts are located.
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The front edge of the lower trunk carpet is held to the car with an adhesive tape that's really difficult to peel loose. You don't usually see this tape because it's covered by the rubber seal.
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Trunk with the carpet removed.
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Another angle.
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The mounting points for the rack can be seen through the oval openings. It will be 4 more hours before you get to loosen these.
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Remove the pinch bolt connecting the steering column to the steering rack. It has already been removed, in this photo. The steering column connects to the rack right at the firewall.
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Now you get to jack up the car. I used two floor jacks and then placed jackstands with rubberized heads, under the A-arms. (You'll see those a few posts down)
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The "before" photo.
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Remove the front belly-pan (3 screws and 10 8mm nuts)
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This is what you're up against. All of this stuff is in your way.

This is what you'd see if you slid yourself under the car head-first.

The two large tubes on the left are power steering fluid. The center pair are the air conditioning, and the two on the right carry coolant to the heater core.

(you can just make out a glimpse of the steering rack; the brass-colored thing running more or less horizontally in the photo. Still bolted to the car at this point.)
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With the car jacked up as much as I have it in the front (and wheels on the ground in the back) only about a quart or less comes out when the coolant lines are removed. It's a good time to change the coolant anyway, if you haven't recently.
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Remove the sway-bar drop links.
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The drop link now spins out of the way.
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I marked the alignment adjuster, so I can get it ballparked later. I used these marks to count the exact number of turns when I removed the lock nut from the rack.
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Once the rack is detached, the disc pivots out of the way, giving you better access to the sway bar.
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Just a little twist on this eyelet relieves the tension on the brake cooling duct. I forgot to photo this on the driver's side, so this is me loosening it on the passenger side.
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(Now that the cooling duct is hanging out of the way)

Ignore the blue tape. It's just there to protect the threads and keep the lock nut in the same position until the rack is out.

What this photo is really here to show, is the puller in the center/left of the photo.

Here, I've already removed the pinch-bolt at the end of the sway bar, and am now using the puller to slide the arm off of the sway bar. You could probably get it to wiggle loose eventually by hand, but this made it easy.
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Now you can remove the mounting bolts for the sway bar. It's a little tight here. You may need a wobble extension, like I did. Also a slightly deeper socket would have been handy.
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Having already disconnected the AC below, I disconnected the other end of the AC line above. This is necessary, because this AC line has to come all the way out of the car in order for the rack to come out.
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I don't show it here, but I've now unbolted the four rack bolts through the oblong port holes in the trunk. It's about the easiest part of the job.

Here is where it appears to get impossible. The rack can't come out until these two hard power steering lines (shown below) are removed. With every tool I had available, it was not possible to remove the lines by going at it in this direction.

Here, I'm just using the screwdriver to point at the PS lines.
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So, now that you're good and dirty, it's time to throw a bunch of microfiber towels over the driver's seat and slide on your belly into the footwell. It might be possible to do this step earlier, I'm not sure.

Peel back the carpet and unbolt the four 8mm nuts that hold the large rubber grommet into the firewall. Once the grommet is removed, you can use box end wrenches to access the 17mm and 19mm bolts (shown in the previous post) holding the hard power steering lines to the rack. It took an immense amount of torque to unscrew these. I had to use one wrench on the end of the other in order to get enough torque to loosen them.
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I've omitted all of the things you need to do a second time on the passenger side. But you do need to disconnect the other end of the rack remove the other end of the sway bar, unbolt the sway bar mount and slide the sway bar out of the car. (it comes out easily)

Once the hard power steering lines are removed from the rack, it's time to rotate the rack forward 45 degrees and slide it out the passenger side as far as it will go without forcing it.
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Then the rack slides down and out toward the driver's side.

The brake and clutch line are in the way, and I had to nudge them a bit to get by them. I would have just removed the lines, but I just bled my brakes a month or so ago. They feel great and I didn't want to mess with them. Depending on how your brake and clutch lines are routed, they may have to be removed before this step.
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Success!

It took exactly 6 hours to get to this point.
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