Sorry if I offended you, but I have a very very low tolerance for vague answers that are all over the map when it comes to people here spending their time to give free advice. In the past I've been willing to dig into the service manual for people, take screenshots of the pages detailing their problems, etc., etc. When someone says; "My mechanic diagnosed it....but then I took it to the Ford dealer...and they want to replace the whole front end of the car..." but don't have any codes to share, it makes me suspicious that what I'm really dealing with is a used-car lot person who is buying these cars to "flip" them and doesn't have the Slightest Idea of what they're doing, but want free advice. So I'm sorry; don't take it personally.

In the past year, as gas prices have skyrocketed, I've gotten a lot of requests for help on cars like this - and not just on this forum. Some of them are from bonafide owners who are in trouble, some of them are from guys who work at used car lots by the side of the road who want to get the car fixed as fast and cheap as possible so they can unload it on another unsuspecting person, who is then going to have major headaches.

Since you supplied the code, here is what my workshop manual for a 2011 says:

B1342 - ECU is Faulted - DIAGNOSE all other DTCs first. If no other DTCs are present, INSTALL a new SJB . REFER to Smart Junction Box (SJB) in this section. TEST the system for normal operation.

The SJB - Smart Junction Box is located on the lower left side of the front passenger footwell. You can see that it has nothing to do with the steering column and can be a pain of its own kind to replace, requiring a scan tool to upload data into. Did someone put a Big Gulp into the cupholder that overflowed and seeped down into the SJB causing the fault? Did someone try to wash the interior with too much soapy water that then flowed down into the SJB? Did some doofus try to drive the car though floodwater that came in through the doors and made contact with the internal wiring and the SJB? Nobody knows.

So - we have to get to the bottom of the root cause here - which is maybe not being shown according to your post. Then we can diagnose from there. As ShadyEscape says, I would start by checking fuses. If your steering isn't being assisted *at all* that means the electric assist is totally off. The best news would be a bad fuse, a loose connector, some piece of schmutz that got in somewhere - or even a MOUSE that bit into a wire and you can find it and fix it. That happens! The cost of repair is about 10 cents worth of electrical tape and a splice.

 

By the way - don't discount the "mouse that bit into a wire" theory. I've seen it happen on a Subaru my family owned that was parked outside near a bird feeder for a week. The birds knock seeds on the ground. The chipmunks, squirrels and mice come and get 'em. Then the mice crawl into the car. And Ford Tech Makuloco has diagnosed a similarly strange problem involving corrosion in an odd location that breached the insulation and slowly wore the wire down, causing an intermittent, very difficult-to-trace but cheap-to-repair fault. So once it's found, the repair might be very cheap. The problem is finding it, but there might not be anything wrong with the steering column and its subassemblies at all.

 

I did not say I did not have codes to share. I said I wanted to wait until I got the car back from the dealer so I could run the codes again. That’s not vague. Your nasty little summary of my messages leaves out a lot of detail I did provide, and I have little information from my mechanic because his English isn’t good. You seem to find a lot of perfectly innocent things suspicious. And your snotty assertion that the code I cited has nothing to do with the steering ignores the part of the code readout that specifies a fault in the “Power Steering Control Module.” Maybe read the whole message next time.

I never asked you to go digging in the manuals or to do anything else. You volunteered. If you resent going to the effort, why not just stop?

Nothing I wrote or didn’t write justifies what a jerk you are. From now on, please ignore my posts. I do not want your help. I will leave this thread active in case someone else can offer a simple suggestion without being bitter and suspicious about it. Go away. PS: NOT A DEALER, NOT A FLIPPER, JUST A GUY TRYING TO MAKE HIS CAR WORK. I honestly don’t care what you believe.

 

That's perfectly fine by me. Good luck in your future endeavors.

 

Okay, so, here’s a lesson: I ordered a lower steering column from a junkyard, watched a YouTube video a dozen times to learn the steps, and was working up to getting started replacing the power steering control module and motor. But I was mindful about your comment about fuses, so, not expecting to find anything, before taking the steering wheel off I checked the user manual and located the under-hood fuse for the power steering control module, a big MIDI fuse. It didn’t look burned or open. But the fuse element looked different from the fuse next to it. So what the hell, I changed it out. Two minutes. And now… my steering works.

Four months driving around with no power steering and it was a $9.99 FUSE all along! My mechanic missed it. The Ford dealership’s tech missed it, and charged me $189 for looking. A FUSE.

I feel so stupid. And relieved.

 

Even though we're officially not talking to each other, I'm glad you found it so inexpensively and shared that information for others to benefit from. The credit really also goes to @ShadyEscape, who first recommended checking the fuses. Always do the cheapest, simplest things first, from fuses to connectors and so forth. As these cars age, things can fail in some strange and hard-to-predict ways. Ford isn't sending out any new TSBs for these years, as far as I know.