Theres a few questions below. Please feel free to answer any or all of them. Any help is appreciated. I tried to organize the post below 

I put a lot of the details i know about this car in the intro thread, but some basic info will be included.

95 legacy, 231k, lots of work has been done to maintain the engine and tranny, however i inherited a mess of safety issues. I will bullet my concerns below to keep organized and an easy read. Hopefully this post will keep my spacing inbetween topics. 

 

1)Alternator: just discovered today, but someone had clamped the wires into the terminal connectors with the insulation, this inevitably melted and corroded the wires underneath and caused a short, i jerry rigged it for now, but the terminal bolt is also stripped and will not come off, nor can it be tightened...

The alternator is fine otherwise, my question is am i able to replace just the terminal on an alternator? Or am i looking at changing the whole unit :(... Not that its hard, but you gotta hate wasting money because someone sucked at life when installing the current one.

 

2)Popping noise front passenger wheel area when hitting harder bumps?: I have replaced the rack and pinion, and inner and outer tie rods. The cv axles look fine and have no excessive play or anything. I am between the control arm bushing, which look fine, but not that you can see it, or the ball joint, which looked fine until i caught a specific angle and saw that one side of it is completely bare...

The question here is, if it isnt the ball joint, will the control arm bushing become dangerous if failed, it looks like a solid piece with no chance of catastrophic failure unless it becomes unbolted... The driver side ball joint by comparison looks fine and its claimed just that one was repaired within the last yr or 2... With the otherone being at least 40k miles. Maybe older... 

 

3)Steering: The reason why i changed the rack and pinion is because it was shot. Wasnt leaking but there was a lot of free play in the steering, there was alot of free play just pulling on the tie rods themselves, there was definite stiffness in the steering that increased the more it was used throughout a driving session(i.e. lots of turns in short amount of time would cause very notable rise in stiffness). And on hard turns from stop or going slow caused alot of vibration and feedback in the steering... So new one is in and fine, most of the symptoms are gone, but occasionaly i still get that vibrating feedback... Occasionally... And its no where near as severe...

My question here is, am i just experiencing some aire in the system and need to rebleed the power steering? Or am i getting a warning sign that the pump is going out? Any other thoughts or suggestions on this question would be appreciated.

 

Thanks for your time... I appreciate any thoughts or advice.

That popping sound is classic ball joint failure. 

Get a salvage alternator. 95 through 98 is a direct swap in.  Flush the power steering with new fluid and then re bleed with wheels off the ground, 6 full turns right to left.  Agree about ball joint. Also check both right and left lateral links, the plastic around the bushing can crack and have play and make a popping sound in turns. Moog makes a replacement.