[Nevin]

Bill, I appreciate the input!

The issues of why I decided to go ahead and do all this stuff were as follows.

1. leaking valve seals made the car smoke badly if it had been sitting say... 4 or 5 days. Lucas oil stabilizer had helped, but it was just getting worse.

2. Under "high" boost conditions (14-16 psi) I would sometimes get some black smoke as well. After checking the turbo, I did find a bit of side to side play which would lead me to believe a thrust washer was going bad, and a seal was on it's way out. It was cheaper for me to just buy a new cheapo ebay turbo than have my old Garrett rebuilt, by about 3x as much! I purchased a turbo that was an upgrade, but also a direct replacement to the one I previously had.

3. Exhaust manifold gaskets started leaking (about a week before, this is what really made me decide to do it.) The cause of this was that I didn't mount a turbo pedestal to hold the weight of the turbo when I put the larger one on before, and the studs started to strip after a while. This caused the car to have an annoying puttering sound as well as being down on power from the decreased boost. This time I replaced with 10mm studs instead of 8mm, and it does seem a lot more secure. Also I fabricated a new pedestal to hold the weight of the turbo which seems to be working well.


Really though, the car was running just fine before. Didn't really ever miss, had gobs of torque, and got decent mileage. It never stuttered before, and responded very well when the turbo started spooling up, no bucking or missing.

But once I decided to tackle all these things, I just decided that I may as well do the injectors and the pump as well for good measure. I didn't want to have all that work and then have the thing go "kaboom." I would rather overbuild than cheap out.

I installed the wastegate and checked it's operation as well. My thoughts are, if the wastegate wasn't working it wouldn't pitter patter like it is, my guess is that it would just make as much boost as it could, in the case of a malfunctioning actuator. I hardly thing it would cause a "studdering."

These are just all my thoughts anyway. Id love to hear if you have any other advice.

I'm trying to go back and retrace all of what I did so I can maybe narrow it down a bit.

And really, thanks again. It's good to hear ideas from someone else with more experience than I have.