Need help finding a power steering seal remover, maybe.

I have been rebuilding my Rabbit power steering rack, just because, and I have everything out but the rack seal in the very middle. Small diameter hole, fairly large seal, up against a reduction in diameter in the housing.  I have a HF seal remover set, with slide hammer.  The largest seal remover that I can stuff through the seal (after some mods to get the next size up to fit) still will not expand far enough to get the seal out. I am stuck. I can make a seal remover from scratch, but that seems like a silly amount of work for the payoff. I can put the modded remover into a lather to give it a sharper shelf, which might work and might not. I can put it all back together as a core on a rebuilt unit, but that is throwing away the seal kit that is almost all installed. I can also run the rack non-power, which is how I have been running it, but I would rather finish "fixing it." The goal is to have power as an option if the uprated motor makes unpleasant amounts of torque steer.

The seal ID is about .85 (22mm or so) and I need to expand to something near 1.2 (32mm or so). This is two steps in the world of readily available seal pullers.

Does anybody have a trick I can try or the proper tool I can borrow? At this point, $100 (cheap if I could find it) for a tool that only does this one job is not really a good plan, since I am unlikely to be stupid enough to try this again.

If it's too deep down into a bore, can you not use a long dowel or something ?

It is the seal between the power portion of the rack and the unpowered portion. It seals against the rack and the smaller diameter portion the rack runs in. The portion the rack runs in is bigger than the rack, but not by enough to allow a dowel to reach the solid portion of the seal. It only appears to be grippable by an expanding remover.

Can you fish a piece of flat stock in against the back part of the seal and drive against it from the other end?  I'm thinking of a variation on an axle bearing puller like below but driven from the back instead of pulled from the front.

In reply to APEowner :

No, I can't, the bore that the flat stock would go through is too much smaller than the seal OD. If I could, I would just use an expanding remover pushing from the other end, but no dice. From what I can tell, it needs something that expands radially right at the edge of the seal.

In reply to matthewmcl :

So, the seal is right up against the smaller bore?  How far down in the larger bore is the seal?

In reply to APEowner :

Yep, right up against the smaller bore, right smack in the middle of the rack housing. 10 inches, or so.

I was able to get enough grip to rip out the stiffening ring in the seal, but I have not yet been able to grab the main body of the seal.