thek, im the poor bugger that brought a brand new generic brand garrett and was full of shavings etc, cost me over $500 for the turbo and then had to spend another $400 on getting it rebuilt so if i were you, go genuine, learn from my mistake!
bit of a long storey, but, when i brought the turbo, it had a t3 rear housing (me not knowing t3 and t4 rears were different) so when i brought my turbo setup for the xflow i then learnt the hard way again.
Anyway, with the turbo setup i got the original small, AiResearch to4, but it had a small front housing and my new turbo had a bigger one (which flows just over 600hp) but the t3 rear, so, off to the turbo shop to see if i can get the rear housings changed, simple job they said, just had to use the shaft out of the old turbo, reco it, balence etc and simply swap the rears, easy job! well......then the drama started!
Got a fone call, they telling me that they pulled down my brand new turbo, only to find it was full of shavings, and, in the front housing found a huge swarf of machined metal which was 2in long!
The conversation continued on to say that the centre housing also was a poor casting and had lots of tiny pits in the metal and basically they said it would be a time bomb if i used it.
So, from my brand new $500 turbo, the only original parts i have of it are the front housing and wheel, the rest i had to replace the centre (which i got them to fit a water cooled one instead of a normal oil cooled) and the rear housing is off the original turbo setup and is a to4 rear. A very expensive and hard way to learn about these things but then again we learn from our mistakes.
There is little bits and pieces i left out but thats the basic storey
Now just cant wait to throw the bloody thing on and see if it was all money well spent..... i hope you all learnt something from this storey, if you wanna play turbos, go the genuine, well known brands as the quality is much much better, may cost you a little more but saves the heartache later on.
take care
