Were other bolts loose too? Assembling it wrong can kill it too.

Still could be a piston ring, or something like that. Or metal shavings from various parts or fittings used.

Did you check the inside of the manifold?
Stephanie

I also need to know where this is and why I have never heard of it. It's like El Ray, I didn't know about it and that place is amazing.

you need these
http://failblog.files.wordpress.com/...pg?w=400&h=300

or this
http://bp3.blogger.com/_wb8bAl1P-N0/...ldo%2Bbike.jpg

New York Bagel Shop
9724 Hillcroft St (just S of South Braeswood)
Houston 77096

oh yeah, way Jewish part of town... makes sense... will eat.

El Ray is El win.

I am new to turbos and I know Garretts rep (That's why I bought it!) but I really don't see how this is my fault. (sheds tear ;) )

Stephanie, thank you for the interest, you're keeping me on my toes and making me think about anything I might have missed.

Can you push the turbine into the side of the housing?

After the original assembly, no. After the meltdown, just barely.

Speaking of, when I looked at it I swear it looks more like the turbine melted and deposited metal on the housing. It's tough to see in pictures and the turbo is already on it's fantastic voyage so I can't take more.

man, i hate workin there!

im not racist, but for the love of god indians do not need to own resturants. if they didnt take over the chain and things were done the good ole fashoned way that place would be makin some killer bank! not to mention the wages would be a lil higher!

when they took over they ditched the kitchen and started ordering all the donuts and having them brought in once a day! when that happend they dropped the pay from salary (equaled out to bout 11 bucks an hour) to 8 bucks an hour. the mother fuckers cant even pay their bills. there bout to repo our pepsi cooler cause they arnt payin for the shit! :giggle:

Bagels and turbos, What the hell is goin on?

One of the fins in the photo is shiny on the outer edge, and none of the others are shiny. Seems odd, as if it something hit the front face of the impeller wheel.

Also, Ive looked at a lot of turbo wheels and have never seen fins that have a almost chiseled look like in the photo. All of the wheels Ive ever looked at were very smooth and finished.

Fixed.

And the lastest... Nothing, still waiting on Garrett's verdict.

I think you might being seeing the one blade with white paint on it. All the turbos I've seen have one blade on each side color marked. Must be for balancing or indexing, I'm not really sure. As far as the chiseling... I have no idea.

I'll let you know if I when I hear from Garrett.

the part whey you clocked it may be where they'll get you on the warranty.

i've ruined a turbo by clocking and not properly seating the CHRA in the compressor housing.

was the shaft still straight after this happened? I'd be super surprised if the blade contact didn't bend it.

best of luck.

Am I missing something on this "Teflon tape"? The way Stephanie stated her post or at least the way I read the context, it seems as if there is a negative to Teflon tape?

there is.

After six weeks at Garrett this is the report they sent. (see pic)

As a side note, Just to get the car on the track, I removed the manifold and downpipe and added a china header. The Link has a map for N/A Big injectors and after some fine tuning the car ran great at Roebling. No abrasive anything flying out of the motor. I guess I had more faith in their engineers coming up with something better then that. This is almost insulting.

I wrote the distributor to find out if there is a way to have it re-evaluated or if I should call my lawyer. I'll keep you updated.

Do you have a catalytic converter? If so was there any bits of shit?

test pipe. And the down pipe was originally coated with a ton of oil from the previous turbos non-existent seals. I would have seen something when I installed the new turbo and cleaned the WBO2. I went through the manifold with a damn dental mirror and a flex light to check for any marking...nothing.

Sounds like foreign particle to me. It is not insulting, this type of damage happens all the time. It is considered a user induced failure, usually unknowingly though. It is not a manufacturing defect. It could be anything from a piston ring to the internal pieces on some part failed. Smaller particles can find their way thru an intercooler, so it could even be something that the air filter is letting thru. It may not have been an ongoing thing either, hence the current turbo is fine. Check the intercooler or throttle inlet tubing for damage or debris.

Turbos fail for all sorts of reasons. No turbo is bullet proof. If you had a china charger on it, I am sure it would have had the same demise. You can try going over ATP's head, but they pretty much have the final say. Good luck!
Stephanie

Thanks, I'll look at the IC and TB when I pull the header tomorrow. As for failed parts... Compression is good all the way across and the motor runs strong as heck (for an NA 1.6) you make me want to tear it down again just to make sure.

Would it be possible to send this unit to Begi? Kind of a second opinion type thing from another turbo specialist?

I can't sleep so I'm looking at everything again. I have a question for those with some technical knowledge; Do ceramic coatings break down over time?

Here's a theory...the manifold on this car is from one of the original FM kits, probably purchased in the early 90's. From what I can tell, FM didn't originally offer ceramic coatings as an option. this manifold does have a nice white ceramic coating inside of it. Is it possible, over time and abuse, for this coating to become a powder? I know sand tore up helo rotor blades bad, I can't imagine what ceramic dust would do. There are no large areas of coating missing but i can see hairline cracks in it.

Is it possible the ancient coating is giving way and that is the "foreign object"?

im no expert but i believe i heard that the ceramic can destroy a turbo, ill leave it to the experts. ive been following this post since the begining, you pay a premium price for a good turbo that you can get a knock off for a 1/4 of the price. you think with the competition they would atleast stand behind there products a little better.

Bagels fuckin' suck.

Why the hell didn't my FM turbo come with a restrictor this is BS. After I fouled the threads on that one I had a hydraulics shop make me a new one and that bitch is unrestricted too. Not cool.

Braineack's car ate one of his throttle body screws and pooped it out through the turbine... shit happens.

and the turbo still worked...just not well because it was making slight contact.

If any of that ceramic coating is flaking off, there is a good chance you have found your culprit. Yes, it could damage the turbine blades.

I don't think I would ever put any kind of coating on the inside of a manifold.

One of my buddies just had to replace his CHRA because two rear cylinders had some detonation and lost the ground straps off of the spark plugs. Those two little pieces ate the shit out of his turbine blades. You would think that they would just go through and maybe hit one blade and be done, but it doesn't work that way.

Compression will only tell you so much. You really should do a leak down test before you say for sure the motor is okay.

I could tell you what ATP told you. Probably not even that much. They have the ability to tear into the CHRA to see if the fault lies there, we do not. ATP knows their stuff. I have never found them to be wrong, or not have iron clad proof.
Stephanie

Thanks for all your inputs. My wife basically pulled the leash in about taking on Honeywell and she's totally right.

The AD is being really good to me, he's going to "cost" me the the CHRA and he's going to try machining the "deposits" out of the housing to see if it is salvageable. All without charging me labor. I have no issues at all with them, they've been great and seem to be going out of their way to make up for Garretts short falls.

It does really bother me that will have spent enough to buy 4 china chargers. I would think with all the knock offs out there Garrett would be willing to do more to keep a customer willing to spend the money they ask. If I had any idea this would be my story I would have risked it on a cheapo and replaced it once happily knowing I had still saved almost half of this total bill.

I'll be taking the remaining time to re-do a botched oil pan seal. Anyone ever do this successfully in the car using the tilt motor method? I really don't want to pull the motor again, my apartment complex has decided to do "inspections" next week and I'm worried about having the car apart, we aren't even supposed to do oil changes here.

On the other hand, the mother in law brought back some smoked salmon from her latest adventure...Bagels and Locks..MMMMM. :)

support engine with engine puller and drop the subframe enouph to get the oil pan off. Thats what i did.

Thanks, I would have figured that would be more work then pulling the engine but I'll definitely look into it.

I've done both (pulled motor once, pulled oil pan once). If I had to do it again, I'd pull the motor.

--Ian

Good to know, Thanks!

I finally got my turbo back! Three friggin months later!!! The AD was really good to me, only charged me parts for the CHRA and just milled the excess deposited material out of the housing.

Bottom line I've now spent $1400 for this turbo and it's only been in my hands for about 5 days out of the last three months.

I could have bought 4-5 Chinachargers for the same amount, received the same level of care from the MANUFACTURER and I wouldn't have had to wait three months for a new one.

Your call, I just don't see how any company can have this type of business model and the level of competion and plan to stay in business very much longer.

Personally, I would never recommend Garrett to anyone, the extra money I paid for the name has got me nothing but that...a name on my housing.

Sucks man. Did you install it already?

One of the biggest things that steered me towards a chinacharger (aside from price) is the fact that if something goes wrong, the a brand name company like Garrett will give 0% of a shit and make you buy another one. 5 chinachargers would have to fail on me to add up to the price of a brand name unit.

The kind of business model where they won't replace turbos that ingested foreign objects?

I was pretty nice about it on M.net but now you're just acting like a child, dude. It's been explained over and over, and all you do is talk about theory and possibilities of failures. Can you reasonably come up with an explanation for what failed on your turbo to produce your symptoms and failure mode?

-No shaft play
-No shaft bent
-Turbine wheel contacted the housing in one small area

So either
-The housing wasn't clocked correctly, causing it to touch the wheel and cause the damage - it sounds like you clocked the housing correctly, but this will cause your failure and it wouldn't be Garrett's fault. OR
-Your turbo ingested something from the motor - obviously not Garrett's fault

You have absolutely no evidence of any issue with the turbo beyond what would be caused by user error (foreign object ingestion) - you even admitted that you have ceramic coating on the inside of the manifold, and the coating has hairline fractures in it. Despite this, you continue to insist that Garretts fail all the time, and that your failure obviously constitutes a widespread manufacturing or design flaw on Garrett's part, and they should compensate you for it - despite a total absence of other collaborative stories.

Do you understand how ridiculous this sounds? I don't mean to offend you (even though I probably have) but I do feel like you need a bit of a reality check.

This is why I am to afraid to buy a garrett. Paying 1000 dollars just to watch it go up in flames because my engine pukes up something makes me cringe.

no it's the business model where one guy out of thousands gets screwed and the rest are super happy with a quality product. seems unsustainable doesn't it?

Glad to hear you got it straightened out. I'm glad I went with a China charger.

Chinese:
http://www.shanghai-central.com/chin...se%20girls.jpg

North America:
http://www.jokedujour.com/battle/chinese-torture.jpg

It appears I have made the wrong decision.

No offense taken to anyone's opinions.

Maybe a bit more of this story would help you understand why I have a hard time believing even the far fetched abrasive idea.

1) I had just been through this entire motor, checked all the tolerances of the lower end, port matched and polished the head then had it tanked. Since the failure I removed the head completely again, checked the inside of both the intake and ex mani's, combustion chambers, piston tops...nothing out of the ordinary. Put the motor back together with a china header, reset the Link to NA Big Inj and drove the $h1t of the car at Roebling Road Raceway, again with no issues. I have been driving like that for the three months I've been waiting to get the turbo back!

2) There was an original Tec turbo on this car, attached to the same manifold with the ceramic coating. The only reason I bought the Garrett in the first place was to upgrade old technology rather then just rebuilding the Tec. (it needed seals but had almost no play) The manifold was never changed. Explain how that turbo survived 10+ years and the Garrett lasted an hour and a half.

Bottom line for me, knowing what I now know, I wouldn't have bothered wasting my money and time on the Garrett.


As far as the install, I've got too many holiday plans to finish the install. Hopefully first week of January will be a bit less hectic.

Coincidence, bad luck, you ingested something from the intake manifold and it made it all the way through (it happens).

Explain how your turbo failed because of something Garrett did wrong.

If you're willing to accept the story of some abrasive (not object, read the report) making it through the compressor, intercooler, intake, engine and exhaust(or any combination of that), leaving no sign of any damage except the turbine wheel that's your prerogative.

The only thing that changed was the turbo unit. The only damage anywhere in the system was the turbine and a different brand of turbo had survived in the exact same spot for all those years.

I'm not a metallurgist nor do I claim to be a professional at any of this but when several people that have been doing turbos since they were only found on semi's and even the AD says they have never seen anything like this before, I would think it would cause you to question it.

In truth I would have loved to send it to an independent lab to have it diagnosed but even for just the housing deposits the $$ was astronomical. I even checked to see if UNF's Engineering department wanted to take it on as a pet project. They joked about voiding the warranty, ironic. I don't have the resource to fight this.

Garrett has set them selves up to so the average Joe has no chance of recovering a warranty claim. Even if Garrett had stepped up and offered the CHRA at cost it would have been something but that had to fall on the AD, a private shop. Garrett even charged him to ship it to them and back again!

I'm not telling anyone not to buy one, I just put my experience out there so other people know about it and can make a more informed decisions about already stretched budgets.

And yet you cannot come up with a story as to how the Garrett unit failed and caused your damage. I have heard of foreign object damage before - it is rare, but it does happen.

I'll ask again: Explain to me how a Garrett defect/error caused your turbo failure. I have no problem providing a scenario that will cause your failure at no fault of theirs, but you seem unable or unwilling to provide a scenario where their failure causes your failure.

Correlation is not causation - blatant logical fallacy. Lots of amateur mechanics make this mistake - "I just changed my clutch and now there's a clunking from the rear suspension, oh god what did I break" when in fact the two problems are totally independent.

It's sad that you're continuing this. Garrett has done absolutely nothing wrong, you've presented no evidence at all that they've done anything wrong, but you continue to insist that they are somehow financially responsible for your poor luck.

lol @ angry socialist

Here's a cut and paste from the other thread;

If you take a look at the pictures you'll see the turbine fins are warped looking now and the "scoring" of the housing is where material has actually been added to the housing, not scored out of it.

Warping of metal is a sign of heat fatigue. Also the very ends of the blades are generally the most thin part of the blade and are more vulnerable to heat stress/fatigue then the rest of the blade. It is possible there is an issue with the metal used for this turbine wheel, it may not have the heat tolerance it needs.

If this was the case, the tips of the wheel may have melted, even for a split second, and then deposited themselves on the housing because of centrifugal force.

The only way to determine this would be to either take a sample of the deposited material and test it against a sample of the wheel itself or to heat stress the wheel and observe the melting point.

Both of these procedures would be costly...

It's only a theory, as I said, I don't have the resources to research it.


If I had replaced the turbo and the rear end was clunking, I might see your logic in this. This was part for part replacement with a failure of the new replacement part. Defective new parts, that's unheard of, even to us amateurs. ;)

Lulz. Are you studying for the GRE?

I hope Garrett is paying him for putting in such efforts defending them in every single thread.

Care to post the rest of that conversation - specifically the part where I rebuked that argument, and then the part where you agreed that it's not a reasonable argument? I'll do it for you:

So you're insulting/trolling me for standing up for an American company whose name is being drawn through the mud for a problem they had no hand in causing? You fucking kidding? You're a nice guy, Vlad, but I'm pretty offended at that.

You guys should each go buy a honda and then have sweet arguments about which block makes better power at 8000 rpm, and then argue about why your motor took a turd when you made 800hp. Seriously.

.

Im on your side Sav! ;)

I will never own a Chinacharger...

Dude relax, I'm not trolling you or insulting you.
I just don't understand why you take all this stuff so personally.
I understand that you've started a small American business/company yourself (TSE) and I applaud you for that, but does that all of a sudden mean that you have to attack every single person that ever has a problem with any American company out there? I hope not, cause then you've got lots of arguing to do on the internet. So much that you should probably take it up as a 24hr/day full time job.

I think its shitty that they offered literally nothing to help the situation and uphold their "good" name. Many companies would at least offer him SOMETHING. From what I read here he's got literally jack shit from them.

Now I know what you're going to say next: "if they do that for every jackoff that claims they have a defective turbo they'll just give away every penny they ever make".

that's not true.

I work for a very large/profitable (American ;))company that provides medical and prescription insurance coverage and we have TONS of cases similar to what this thread is about: in fact I deal with many of them. When a customer is unhappy, even if its 99% not our fault, if there is even a 1% chance that we can at least somewhat satisfy the customer and get them not to drag our name through the mud we will try to help them. If there is even 1% chance that we COULD HAVE done something differently/better and prevented the situation from ever happening we will try everything we can to "make it right" or at least help out.


Tell me HOW Garrett is any different from the chinacharger companies?
You buy chinacharger, it breaks (and in most cases NO ONE knows whether its from defective chinacharger or shitty installation or user error like OP), you are SOL.

You buy garrett, spend 5 times as much, it breaks, and 99.99% of the cases I've seen they ALWAYS blame it on user and do nothing about it.

Do a search, and show me the cases where they replaced a turbo, and I'll do the same and post the threads/occurances where they rejected the turbo and deemed user error.

So does that mean their product is flawless and never breaks, and 99.99% of the cases where it does has nothing to do with the product?

I find that hard to believe.


Anyways, thats how I see it.
If I offended you it was un-intentional and I apologize. But I simply do not agree with you on this topic, whereas I pretty much agree with you on most other things.

Maybe I should clarify the American Companies bit.

I'm referring to normally large companies that were built the right way, on sweat equity and the backs of their laborers. Companies that at one time rewarded the workers long term dedication with vacation pay, real Christmas bonuses (even a small one) and if you were really dedicated a pension. Then some jack ass "businessman" CEO/CFO or conglomerate buys said business, moves it's assets (jobs) out of the US and strips it of everything but it's name in pursuit of the bottom line.

I.E.

General Motors. They get so bad in the quality control and management of assets they had to go in front of Congress and ask for a loan to stay afloat and then as soon as their fearless leader fly's back to Detroit in their private jet he grabs his golden parachute, courtesy of you and I and bails on the company. Fixing nothing! I was a die hard Chevrolet fan. I own a 1994 Saturn SL2 with damn near 500k miles on it and this "American Company" closed them down to save a buck!

This story can be told over and over and over again.

I am not knocking the small business owner at all. In fact in both threads I defended the Authorized Distributor. He did what Garrett should have and made a lifetime customer to HIS SHOP out of me. I think the biggest issue with all of this is that the huge corporation that is Garrett by Honeywell left the small business owner out to dry. They even charged one of their own distributors for the shipping of their merchandise!
In truth I would be raving this shops name in order to reward the owner with word advertising this sort of thing can bring but I worry about repercussions to his small business by Garrett.

That is the American business I'm referring to, not the little guys.

Hell, I go totally out of my way to shop at places like Ace hardware just so my money doesn't go to a company like Walmart, the sad part is it actually seems to take effort NOT to shop at Walmart!!!

He got the same offer that every other customer with a damaged CHRA got - a bunch of money off the CHRA.

Here's what ATP charges for the 3 major parts of a turbo:
$450 CHRA (not on their site but this is what I paid for my replacement 2871R last year)
$275 turbine housing
$110 compressor housing
=$835 for a whole turbo

Retail on a 2871R is ~$1170. Assuming they are splitting it up evenly (they aren't, you always pay more when you buy stuff in pieces like this), taking $385 off the $1170 means the CHRA should cost around $785 - but in reality if you can send back your genuine Garrett CHRA they charge you over $300 less than that.

That's what he got - $300 off his brand new CHRA, same as every other person who induces their own failure. Sounds like a damn fair deal to me - when the last time you broke an $800 part and got $300 off its replacement?

I never said it never breaks, did I? I'm just looking at this one case. Look at the photos he posted yourself and try to come up with a manufacturing failure mode - I can't do it.



Right after TSE shipped the first batch of BBKs, a customer called me and said that he had a caliper that was rubbing the rotor, thought it might be the bracket. Shipped it back, inspected the bracket and found no issue. Inspected the caliper, found it was gouged by the rotor (which turned out to be a bum wheel bearing on his end) and found a gouged/seized piston. Replaced the caliper for him at cost, mailed it all back. The customer seemed pretty happy with the outcome - not thrilled about the issue with the caliper, but fine with how I handled it for him. AFAIK he's had no issues with that replacement caliper. I don't recall who ended up paying for the shipping back and forth, but my Paypal records indicate that the customer likely paid for his own shipping costs on that one. Garrett essentially did the same thing - inspected the part, determined they weren't at fault, and gave him a discount on a replacement, so from where I'm sitting Underway's treatment of Garrett seems incredibly unfair.

Is it me or do the bikinis on the Chinese chicks in dustinb's post kinda look painted on?