Oil control rings shot?

[RETed]

There's no reason to be running some catchment system on a street car, no matter how much power or boost you're running.
You just can't run the car hard enough on the street to see an advantage to such system.
Catch cans can cause more mess in the engine bay due to it's design...

The pics of the turbine wheel aren't detailed enough to show any obvious problems...
The color is actually right for a normally running engine.
Maybe you can get some black crud to fall out of the turbine housing by tapping on it with a hammer?
Most likely you have blow-by from the turbine compression ring, but it may not be obvious until you pull the entire turbo apart...


-Ted

[Pete_89T2]

Originally Posted by RETed

There's no reason to be running some catchment system on a street car, no matter how much power or boost you're running.
You just can't run the car hard enough on the street to see an advantage to such system.
Catch cans can cause more mess in the engine bay due to it's design...

Yeah, I agree.

Originally Posted by RETed

The pics of the turbine wheel aren't detailed enough to show any obvious problems...
The color is actually right for a normally running engine.
Maybe you can get some black crud to fall out of the turbine housing by tapping on it with a hammer?
Most likely you have blow-by from the turbine compression ring, but it may not be obvious until you pull the entire turbo apart...


-Ted

Wish I thought of the tapping it with a hammer trick while the DP was still off

[Pete_89T2]

An update... This past Friday, I took the car to Speed1 to have Dave B. take a look and give me a professional assessment of what is going on. Bottom line is the turbo is starting to fail, and it will get progressively worse. Ted nailed it with the failing turbine seal diagnosis.

While I'm happy that the engine itself is healthy, and won't need to be cracked open for a long time, I'm pissed that this turbo is failing prematurely. Like I said before, it's a BNR stage 1 rebuild, that I installed & fired up for the first time on 3/11/2011, and logged only 11,889 miles on it since then as of last Friday. And since I'm running stock boost control, it was never pushed beyond the stock 8~8.5 PSI boost pressure limits. Hell, the stock turbo had 136,XXX miles on it when I shipped it off to BNR for the rebuild, and it didn't smoke anywhere near as bad as this one does now.

[RETed]

If you ever messed with that darned turbine compression ring seal, you'll know that it's a nasty design.
Out of all the nice Garrett (rebuild) parts, it's one of the worst - the thrust bearing come a close second.

I dunno if there is a trick to get that compression ring seal to install correctly consistently, but I haven't figured it out yet.
You got the blasted exhaust shield bell cup loose and getting in the way, and the design of the seal being square-edged don't help with it going in nicely!
If you end up tapping it in - which is the case most times - it's probably damaged from that light tapping.
I use LOTS of oil to try and get the seal to snap into place, and that causes a big smoke show on the initial start up...
This can help sometimes, but it's still not a guarantee!
Then you end up crossing your fingers that the smoke eventually clears up soon!


-Ted