need a little help here

alright everyone I need a little bit of help here. I am doing a compression test on my ca18 today to see if the problem is actually the head gasket but my question is, if you have a blown turbo will you have a serious lose of power and will your idle drop. About 1 month ago (just after the calgary NECC cruise after dtp) my car started to smoke. I forget who it was but the buddy with the yellow se-r was behind me (sorry about that by the way) and I left after tail appliences at the gas startion. well on my way home the car seemed fine since I wasn’t driving as hard but a week later I was driving the car down to meet a friend and the turbo was spooling awsome until I hit a red light, mind you this was the first time in a week and I was pushing it a little bit. I came to a stop and all of a sudden my idle dropped from 1100rpm to 450ish. the car started to sound like crap and well all in all a geo metro could have been faster than my car. Oh ya the car was also smoking like it wanted to put a species into extinction.

So any guess’s? blown turbo, head gasket, seals, rings?

The explanation could be turbo, but could also be other things. If you blew a seal on the turbo, that would explain the smoke (oil or coolant), and the extreme loss of power. What did your boost gauge read?

If your compression test turns out bad I’d do a leak down test to see if it’s vale seals or some thing else. Is there coolant in the oil or vise versa? If there is that would be the signs of a blown head gasket. How hot does it run? If you don’t have any compression it wouldn’t make any power. Just an idea but you might want to make sure your timing hasn’t skipped a tooth or something wierd like that. Any way it’s just a few ideas I hope they help good luck

I took the rad out to let my friend who imported a silvia borrow it and the collant was fine. there was no oil in it. I will do an oil change and take a look at that and see if there is any coolant in it.

I just did the compression test and I shot 150 in all 4.

as for the boost gauge it was reading 6 psi with the t28

might be turbo seals are bad, also might be valve seals.

Valve seals won’t cause THAT condition… Valve seals just stop oil from sliding down the valve guides. Well if you got that on all cylinders, then you know it’s not a head gasket, rings, or anything in the engine internally, unless oil is getting in there and basically doing a “wet compression test” but even so it would be alittle lower then that. It’s something else man.

the only thing i can think of is the oil that i found when I took out one of the coil packs. it was leaking in there from the valve cover gasket. But I am going to take a peak at putting a t25g in there for now.

btw - what are the results of other peoples compression tests with there ca’s