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?