Thread: Blown turbo yesterday

02D2 TD5 136,000km. Driving pretty hard yesterday to get back home after a trip away and mashing the pedal to the floor as you do - suddenly lost all power and could only crawl uphill at about 30kmh. Stopped to have a look under the bonnet, slight sound of marbles and a "kerchink" everynow and then coming from the turbo, most evident on the exhaust side. On idling Nanocom parameters ok, idling smooth etc, just no go. Crawled on gently watching guages, nanocom on water temp 84 deg and nothing otherwise indicating an issue (no smoke). Got a fair way down the road, stopped at a fuel station when the marbles started to get a bit louder. Open bonnet again, find out aircleaner not secured properly (irritated now... as have been swallowing dust for the past week) have a look, turbo vanes still in place, but oil in the hose going to intercooler, oil in inlet manifold after intercooler... Buy 2 litres engine oil, crawl off again (breakdown trucks not really an option where I am) get a few more k's down the road but now have to start to climb a thousand or so feet in short order. Gets harder and harder and oops! where is everyone behind me? Battlefield white smoke out the back in copious quantities. Marbles now much louder, smells foul. Again, you tend not to just stop anywhere here so having checked again temps etc decide low 1st, idle only, crawl up the hill without huge amounts of smoke but its there all right. Get to a spot with mango sellers, stop and start making friends whilst I wait for the shame of a Toymota cruiser to come tow me the 100 or so km back home; in the dark, 3 hours on the end of a rope mostly on sidelights to conserve battery power, firing up the engine only to give the battery a bit of a boost... oh, and fill the 2 litres of engine oil in the car because it's at least that to cover the battlefield with smoke. And yes, before I set off after seeing all the oil made a cap for the snorkel from a water bottle in case it starts eating itself but thankfully that didn't happen. Anyway, will start dismantling things tomorrow and Sunday and will post pics if anything interesting rather than just depressing turns up! Time for a VNT perhaps - and hope I didn't do any damage to the engine whilst getting out of Dodge...

Originally Posted by Panya

Ok turbo off, exhaust turbine is completely finished. Might be a top tip but next time (haha) if I had the same loss of power and marbles sound I thing I'd try to put a normal bolt in the oil inlet pipe instead of the banjo and somehow try to stop the oil feed... the turbine is finished anyway and that would at least stop or slow oil loss from the engine into the exhaust. Dipstick is dry at cold at the moment so I used that 2 litres even with intermittent use of the engine to keep battery charged (and I didn't use it that often!). Any guru's in Aulroland think that would work or would oil pressure burst the oil feed pipe?

I would say it would work in the short term, BUT be aware the Td5 will have around 60psi oil pressure cold, so avoid revving etc until warm. Idle will be fine. It may also be worth considering if you are using it to only run the battery up, and maybe a slow drive out of where you are, removing the inlet pipe from the intercooler TO the inlet manifold and fashioning an airfilter of sorts and thereby removing the turbo and intercooler completely from the circuit. Any fault codes etc present will be repeated from the boost failure anyway.

JC