For those who don’t know, about 2 weeks ago I was heading up to my dad’s camp in West Fulton. I got onto I88 and had to step on it to pass a truck… no problem. Then about a mile or 2 later I went to pass a car and my STi transformed into a Prius… zero balls. Then I realized that I wasn’t hearing the turbo at all and I was making 1psi boost… uh oh. Pull over at a gas station on Rt.7 (where Rt.20 and Rt.7 come together) and looked all over, nothing seemed out of the ordinary and it was running / idling perfectly fine. To play it safe I took Rt.20 back hope (keeping it below 2500rpm). Got it home and after some blood, sweat, swearing, sparks, and just general hell, I finally managed to get the down pipe off. The EWG had some build-up so I thought maybe it was sticking. Cleaned it all up and as I was getting ready to put it back together I found this…:
the internal wastegate welds never penetrated the housing and had let loose… so the internal waste gate flap was ‘flapping’ in the wind. So after some more blood, sweat, swearing, and even more sparks, the turbo was off… and that’s how she has sat since. While pulling it apart I found a major boost leak and major weak point in my IC piping. Where the injection spray nozzle was installed in the pipe, the sealing washer that was on the inside of the pipe (spray nozzle bolted through the pipe) was about ready to come apart and go into the motor… awesome. So the pipe is not with my buddy who is going to weld on a thin bung that I can put a new spray nozzle into… one that will screw in from the inside and prevent any possibility of ever somehow going into the motor. He is also making me a dual catch can setup since I cleaned out about a shot glass or more worth of oil from the inlet duct.
In the meantime, I needed to find a new solution for the internal wastegate. I knew that a weld would never penetrate properly so the inner redneck wheels started turning in my head and I was able to redneck engineer a perfect solution. I went out to what was left of the snowmobile I burned down last year (I haven’t gotten around to scrapping it yet), dug through the wreckage and found one of the stainless steel exhaust springs. After a little chisel work to remove the melted plastic, I had a ‘like new’ heavy duty stainless steel spring. I then used some extra back-strap metal I had laying around (temporary until I can make up some nice stainless steel brackets) and managed to put this together:
A perfect solution that won’t look bad once I make permanent brackets. It will hold plenty… I could barely get it to move even with prying it with a screw driver. Then with some welding, scrap nuts, vice grips, a pipe wrench, some penetrating oil, and a LOT of heat, I was finally able to get what was left of the cut studs out of the manifold… so that I can replace it with some better hardware.
That’s pretty much it for now. My hope is that once I fix the found boost leak, it will fix my odd-ball mis-fire and poor idle issue.
