I just swapped a 9 turbo onto my 8 and I have lots of steam coming from the engine bay. Let me give some details...
-turbo is a stock 9 which has been rebuilt at the expense of the original owner with a larger comp wheel...not an fp or other big name job, it was done by a shop local to him.
-when i received the turbo it was a bit beat up in shipping and had some shaft play of about 1/16" laterally AND in/out.
-as the turbo sat and waited for install i noticed oil leaks from either turbine side or comp side depending on which side the turbo was laying on...slow drip leaks, only noticed it because of oil stains the the towel it was sitting on

-the install went fine...i took my time, torqued to proper specs, cranked the engine for a while to prime turbo before actually turning it over

-after starting it for the first time it runs/sounds normal, afr is normal for idle..high 14 to low 15
-after it runs for about a minute...just long enough for the engine to start getting hot, i see steam from the engine bay, coming up from turbo/dp and manifold area...doesnt smell like usual burning coolant, but i am now using the yellow prestone concentrate with my own ratio of water...about 2/3 to 1/3 water and prestone respectively. anyway, i shut the car down after seeing and smelling the steam for a moment
-start the car back up after all steam has gone...here comes the steam again. keeps on coming so its not just stading water. I let it run to about normal operating temp...at this point the steam is still constant and i notice bubbling from the exhaust manifold where it contacts the head...looks like water and i dont think it can be anything else lol. this is bubling like boiling water with visible liquid droplets. this is occuring at the left-most exhaust port if you are facing the engine standing at the front of the vehicle
-there are no dripping leaks onto the gound underneath...not a drop
-CEL is on and I read these 3 codes
P0340 - cam pos sensor (bank 1 or single sensor) circuit malfunction
P0113 - IAT high reading
P2228 - barometric pressure curcuit low

-I had unplugged the cam pos sensor to crank the engine and obviously plugged it back in.
-I have not unplugged the battery during this entire swap, so no ecu reset yet
-I dont think the car ran for long enough to see if any smoke came out the rear but i didnt see any
-I have a koyo radiator so it takes more than the stock...another odd point...after the first start up the coolant level went down as it should have, so i added more. after the 2nd start up the coolant level rose and would have overflowed but i have one of those tools allows you to remove air from the system so it just collected in there...level went back down after shutting car off.

I know its lots of info, and i have some ideas on whats going on but i want to see if anyone has experience or some ideas of their own. I'm going to start taking it apart tomorrow so we'll see what we find and i'll put up some updates for sure. I'm leaning on bad turbo since it was leaking oil before the install with no pressure, and water is much less viscous than oil so it can escape and enter exhaust channels...you just usually hear of leaking and burning oil when the stock turbos go bad...
Any ideas and advice are appreciated...

 

maybe you hooked the coolant lines up wrong? is it white steam? all MHI turbos have shaft play when the seals are cold also. it shouldnt move when its warm though.

Cels are normal when u unhook stuff without unhooking the battery, the ecu will register it unhooked. just clear them with evoscan.

If the turbos bad it will smoke like crazy out the tailpipe and will have a blue hue color to it.

Sounds like coolant to me man. double check everythings connected right.... also..... double check the oil feedline is sealing with crush washers and not leaking.......

 

I would honestly just swap a nine turbo back on there or go with an FP turbo. The thought of a small shop "making" a turbo for him would frighten me. FP does some insane amounts of testing on their turbos to make sure they perform under different conditons. Swap turbos asap!

 

Yea just by the looks of the turbo itslef or the fact of a "small" mom and pops shop rebuilding this
turbo would have scared me away from installing it...I would deffinately swap turbos as soon as you are able to!

 

Oh man, blown seals. If its sitting there leaking oil it shouldnt have gone on the car in the first place.

 

LOL ya i didnt read the dripping oil part. a new rebuilt turbo thats leaking oil? lol...... new turbo time. be glad it happened now and not under boost as the motor sucked in the turbo shavings as it ate itself up.

 

thanks for the replies sofar...yea this is definetly a questionalble turbo. i dont know how else coolant could make its way to the manifold if its not coming from the turbo. so this leads me to another question..if i have all this steam and bubbling coming from the manifold, is there not a good sealetween the mani and head? if steam can get out, so can exhaust gasses, right. i never noticed any exhaust leak with the old turbo tho. i didnt even take off the manifold for this install but i have a new gasket...i may have to change that out over the naxt few days

 

yes the seal is bad then to the actual exhaust manifold to head also. you have to criss cross pattern and just slowly tighten each bolt. they must be slowly torqued down each one, cant fully tighten one and then go to the next or it will not seal evenly.

id send turbo off to FP and let them look at it. maybe they will cut you a deal with a fp red or a rebuild on it for you.

 

IIRC one(or maybe more) of the exhaust manifold stud that goes to the head actually penetrates the water jacket.

 

the bottom two codes are what you get when you turn the key on with the maf unplugged. Its gonna smoke cuz you just had greasy hands all over the manifold and down pipe.

Water can lay back behind and in between layers of the manifold gasket that arn't contacting the sealing area. My guess is your fine just let ti run for a few mins at temp.

 

It’s very weird to have coolant bubbling through the exhaust manifold. The coolant chamber in the center bearing housing of the turbo is completely separate from the oil. Unless there is a crack in the turbo bearing housing it’s very unlikely that coolant can get into the exhaust manifold. You could throw the old turbo on there and see if the coolant problem goes away. DO NOT BOOST.
Like people have mentioned before, make sure all lines are connected right (I know that’s pretty hard to mess up since they are hard lines). But I would check anyway. Also, when taking your old turbo off you could have gotten some coolant into the downpipe when disconnecting coolant lines from the turbo, depending on steps taken. Still it’s very unlikely that steam makes it all the way up the downpipe to the exhaust manifold.
Try to do a compression test just in case.

I’m about to do a swap to a IX turbo, I’ll let you know if I run into any snags. My 8 turbo was spitting oil ended up fouling the intercooler so bad that the hot compressed air wasn’t getting cold anymore and I had huge amounts of knock. Good luck.

 

gl on the repairs

 

Update for anyone who cares:

Took it all apart yesterday...I figured it was a turbo related problem so I started there. instead of swapping out the entire turbo assembly I decided to leave the bigger, ported and coated 10.5 housing on there and just put the old 8 turbo on...and bingo problem solved. As odd as it sounds, I think there was a problem with the banjo bolt for the water return on the 9 turbo. As i disconnnected lines, the water return was dry initially. As I loosened the banjo bolt, coolant began to flow...a bunch of it. So i think there was a blockage of coolant flow that caused a back up. sounds retarted, but im glad i got the car functioning normally again. And you guys were right, that turbo was junk and shouldnt have even went on the car, but i had to find out for sure. So now I can just send it away, prob to cbrd, like i should have from the start...
So the lesson here is torque to spec. I had to put the water reutrn line on while the turbo was on the car, due to fitment issues, so i couldnt use my torque wrench. I probably over tightened causing poor water flow. thanks again for responses...its time for me to go see Mr. Ivey...