same thing actually happened to me. was leaving my neighborhood, made a left into the suicide about 3-4k rpm i heard a loud pop. checked it next morning and boom theres a baseball size hole in front of my block right under the headers

 

He blew his turbo. Not his motor as you are stating.

 

That is foreign object damage without a doubt. Turbine blades do not eject like that from fatigue or over speeding. Do you have a tubular header by chance? Have you pulled your spark plugs to check and see if any of them are missing an electrode or shrouding? I would suggest a leak down test and possibly pull the head to check for piston damage. Pistons can come apart and still have relatively good ring seal when doing a compression or leak down test.

Something went through that turbo and unless you want to spend more money down the road I suggest finding what it was before something else goes on there.

As for the turbo itself, it would have to be converted to BB since it's a Red.

-Michael

 

Stock manifold(unported), spark plugs looked to be in perfect shape(less than 2k miles on them).
So next step is pulling the head to see what's the cause was.

 

It's a long shot but you may be able to find part of whatever it was in the turbine housing or in the exhaust. That will help you identify the culprit without getting too involved in taking the motor apart.

I'm guessing those compression numbers are from a cold motor not one that's been ran up to operating temps?

-Michael

 

^+1 to this. Carefully inspect your exhaust and see if you find something. All it takes is a little screw of piece of metal to destroy a motor or turbo. Too bad you didnt have a cat as that would make finding the piece much easier.

Assuming a foreign object got into your engine there is a good chance it caused issues in other areas than your turbo. Unless it was from your exhaust manifold the piece had to have been in the combustion chamber at some point and made its way out the exhaust to the turbo.

Good luck with everything; I'll keep my fingers crossed that the carnage is solely contained in the turbo.

 

Just to point out what I'm seeing here. See how the damage gets less severe as you travel in the counter clockwise direction? When a blade fails due to fatigue or over speeding it pulls at the inducer tips because that's where it's the hottest and due to inertia sustains the most force. You can see the blade with the most damage has most if not all of it's inducer tip still intact but is missing all of the exducer tip and a lot of the blade.

That tells me whatever caused the damage impacted there and the resulting damage you see is the blade being ejected after being broken off. I'm willing to bet if you remove the turbine housing and inspect the inducers of the blades to the right of the most damaged one you'll see some slight damage to them. That's where the object entered the volute touched the inducer of the wheel and bounced up and smacked the majorly damaged wheel.

-Michael

 

In English please? jk.

 

I looked through most of the exhaust(all but the rear muffler section) and found nothing inside of it. My assumption is it was part of piston 3 since it was the lowest compression. I would like to do a leak down test but don't have access to a tester.

I appreciate the info michael. Sucks to think that the turbo was destroyed as a result of something else. It's an insult to injury kind of situation(motor build and turbo).

 

You can also use a Probe with a camera and light instead of pulling the head off. Could be a piece of Manifold, Wish you the best.

 

Man there's so much it could be you may not need a motor rebuild.

Could be casting material from the head or manifold.

Sometimes you never figure out what is was. It could have been something from the intake that was small enough to get through the valve without damaging it but just big enough to damage the turbo.

But when you have a failure like this it's never a bad idea to do a thorough inspection.

-Michael

 

I was able to borrow a bore scope thanks to my work and spent a good while looking around each cylinder and the intake and found nothing that would indicate damage/failure. I started thinking about what Michael had mentioned about the damage and decided to pull off the exhaust housing to inspect it a little better and found more damage than I had originally seen and that the wheel was bent severely on the turbine side. Compressor side seems to still be straight at least to the eye.

Quick video I attempted to take with the ole cellular device(pardon the music, didn't think to turn off the radio)

 

It's hard to tell and may just be the flash but it appears that one or more of the blades have aluminum splatter on them. Does their appear to be a coating of aluminum on the turbine blades at all or in the volute of the turbine housing?

I'd like to take a closer look at the turbo so that we may be able to help you figure out what happened. If you could send it to us we'd be happy to check it out for you.

-Michael