Well.... so here we are another two months down the line. And it looks like the scoob is sorted
Huge thanks to Rob for giving up two weekends and assisting with much spannering, tea drinking and humour (of the shaft, nut and hole variety, mainly
). Plus, donating various spare bits & bobs and supplying plenty of new jubilees. But yeah, thanks mate, I'd never have got it sorted on my own
So... it looks like the turbo was the problem all along. Bought a second hand TD04 off a member on here in Hastings and Scott dropped it over as he was passing. As soon as we got my old TD04 off, we knew it wasn't right. There was a load of shaft movement, and you could see a paler area on the intake housing where the compressor wheel has been scrubbing. Add to that, it felt notchy when spinning it and a whole load heavier to turn by hand than the replacement and we thought we'd found the problem.
Twin turbo conversion?
Uppipe was removed as it needed re-wrapping and to refresh old gaskets. In the process of removing the turbo, we also found that the OEM inlet hose was split in the rubber section. It looked like the jubilee had munched it up but it was only good for scrap. So we began destroying that to remove it, as taking the intake manifold off wasn't really on our wish list! Even with all the ports cut off, what an absolute pig of a job. There really is sod all space to manoeuvre it out of there...
The list of bits coming off the car grows....
New turbo inlet, found one that was still thick ply with reinforcing wire (and not cheap ebay tat) whilst still having removable aluminium ports (to aid installation) and not costing £250+ like a Samco or Perrin. There is no way in hell that we'd have got it installed with moving the manifold without removing the aluminium bits...
And then put it all back together again. Mostly in the right order!
Took it for a test drive and it was clear that the fluctuating boost was gone, it pulled smooth all the way through. Thank fook for that. But in a last ditch attempt to annoy us, the car gave us two new gremlins... air had got in the power steering and wouldn't bleed out making the pump sound like a bag of bolts, and I randomly got a double-speed left indicator flash suggesting a bulb was out. No indicator on front morette, so whipped that out. Bulb fine... but:
Of all the random crap... so out with the soldering and a new spade connector. Job done.
Time for a power steering fluid flush. Wow, I'd no idea how bad that stuff could get. Used a vacuum pump to drain the reservoir, replace with fresh, run the pump, empty reservoir again and so on. This is what came out first time (on the left).
It stunk like a cross between burnt oil and old burnt circuit boards. And was way thicker than the fresh stuff... so time for the bin. Took about half an hour and six swaps to get it looking fresh in the system and that's resolved the problem.
Happy days. Even took it out for a nice drive in the sun last weekend:
So hopefully that's the scoob back to full health. A trackday at Bedford Autodrome is booked for 3 weeks time so that'll answer the question one way or another!
