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Subject Video of my failed Turbo (long w/ Pics)
     
Posted by OverZealous (CT) on April 17, 2014 at 11:59 PM
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Message So I've finally been able to confirm my passenger side turbo died. Last year around this time I had just finished putting new BDE VTCs, installing SZ sport clutch, patching up some oil leaks, and got everything back in driving order. I drove the car for 150 miles when driving onto the highway during a pretty hot day boost drops off.

I panic but remind myself I usually overreact in these situations and remain calm. I limp the car home and using my compressor start looking for boost leaks. I found some. Great, I think. Some hoses must have gotten loose over the winter or maybe something got messed up while I had worked on it over the winter. I set out to do a boost leak check.

Here's the first leak that sprung out: The tiny hose clamp was flipped upside down and gouged my accordion pipes really bad.

My little compressor didn't have enough capacity/flow so I bought some hockey pucks at the local sports store, cut them to size, and blanked off the intercooler discharge pipes to segregate the troubleshooting effort. The hockey pucks worked great!

I bought some extra coolant piping to block off the PCV piping and draped it over the plenum like so. Worked great. And of course vice grips work great at blocking flow in a pinch.

By now I was charging my little compressed air tank pretty high just to have enough flow and volume to find the smaller leaks. To ensure I wasn't overpressurizing the block while trying to pressurize the intake track I colored in the below diagram. The red lines are where I blocked off the flowpath.

The last substantial leak I found was at the drivers side coupler. I thought I had the problem licked.

I couldn't find anymore boost leaks so I took the car for a drive. No boost! I started dreading the worst. Some research into long ago posts provided a decent test to see if a turbo was working or not: use the hockey puck to blank off flow to one side of the plenum. The car will run, the idle the system bypasses the throttle bodies anyway. Running the throttle up based on MAF measurements off the closed side of the plenum and you should feel flow coming from the turbo your testing so long as the engine is running above the boost threshold.

Result: drivers side makes huge flow and pressure, passenger side makes 0 flow and 0 pressure. Suck! 95% chance the passenger side turbo is shot. I decided to take off the exhaust and run the engine to see if the PS turbo was seized. To my great surprise it wasn't. It spun but with some noticeable shaft play. I made these two videos of the turbo with the engine running to see how much it was moving around.

La-Z-Link

La-Z-Link

I was done for the season. I was out of time and out of money. This spring I finally took out the engine.

When I finally got the passenger side turbo in hand I was able to see the compressor side was F-d up. Here's the final video.

La-Z-Link

Any other must-do recommendations to engine internals while I've got the engine out?

OverZealous (CT)

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