The arms are cast into the bearing housing so they are not going anywhere. Unless of course I put front struts in the rear, and rotated the arms in, then I could have 4 wheel steering!

It's just a run of the mill Sachs TO bearing, decided to shoot its ball bearings out the side then proceeded to melt itself. Just one of those things, the new part failed.

I thought it was the clutch master because I had no clutch pedal, it turns out I snapped the input shaft to the master off because the slave bottomed out when I was trying to jam it into gear.

Nice throw-out bearing.

Jim, i know you don't know me from adam, but when i am back home there on the front range i would love to meet up with you (as well as any other front range insane audi nazi's ) to see that mean yellow machine!

Any time!

A little update, I've just been trying to get the car 100% sorted, and tring to make a 17 year old car feel like new again. I did a really cheap exhaust upgrade. the old exhaust consisted of a cat with a pipe through it, then to a Borla XR-1 that sat way to low right under the driveshaft bearing, then to an Aero-turbine muffler and out the side.

The new one changes after the cat, going strait into two Dynomax Bullet race mufflers that tuck up as well as a stock exhaust for great ground clearnance. Then I put the Borla where the Aero-turbine used to be.



The sound is slightly quieter than the old system and I really like it. Loud when it needs to be and quite for most highway driving.

I also took the car skiing for the first time with the new turbo, man what a difference! I drove almost the entire way in 5th. Going up those big hills really gets the GT35R spinning easy and I could make 10 psi of boost at 3000 rpms for normal passing. The .82 hotside is still making me happy, I could regulate the boost pressure so well down low with just the gas pedal going up large hills. This has been a big problem in the past with all of my turbos with .63 hot sides.

I also decided to do some body work this weekend.


I kissed a not so soft snowbank while playing rally car...

So now I need a new hood, my front bumper looks like crap my fenders are too small, and my rear bumper is jacked up. I can already see what this summer's project is going to be.

Hmm, what else. I'm going to install one of 034's adjustable cam pulleys this weekend. Hopefully I'll be able to bump the power band down just a little. We'll see what the dyno tells on 3-25-06

Yea, it's funny, I'm pissed that it happened, but first thing I went up, grabbed the wife and said come look at this crazy shit! All the while laughing while taking pictures. She told me she's taking the new turbo money and committing me. I’ll pull it all apart tomorrow, but the turbo still spins free with little play and from what I can tell the compressor didn't even hit.

The new bearing housing was a last ditch effort to save this guy so I’ve been looking at new turbos for a while, kind of anticipating this. The GT30R is great at sea-level and no doubt I’d go with that if I lived down there. But the reality is it takes a pressure ratio of 3.9 to get there at my altitude. Toss in a 12,000 ft pass every now and then and I really start to fear for turbos up here. No wonder those K03’s fail all the time here. I’ve done a bunch of plots at work and I’ll post them tomorrow to see what you guys think. I really want to see how Hap’s car does on the dyno with the GT35R and I honestly might wait if he gets it on the road this weekend.

Then there’s the, how fast does this really need to be factor. It was frightening at 27 lbs of boost, and without the diff locked it was a real handful. I need to talk to my supplier and see what he thinks :wink:

So I was driving along doing 2nd gear pull after 2nd gear pull fine-tuning the car. It was running great at 24 psi of boost. I did a bunch of runs at this level because my knock light kept lighting up and I couldn’t figure out why. Finally narrowed it down to the coils had to much dwell and were tripping it. Cool. So I gave the schrapenalknobben a good turn. Sweet, 27 psi no knock. Damn, I didn’t have the logger going so let’s do it again, but with more boost. Another 1/2 turn later there’s sparks shooting out of the hood vent. WHOA! FECK, the turbo just let go. Lucky for me the car was still running, but with a large exhaust leak so I limped it home 3 blocks and found this:






So why did this happen? Well, who knows. I did just get done trasfering everything over to a new bearing housing because I was having problems with oil seeping out the back. Well it's still dry even after all this. It looks like the turbine just snapped off. I made sure everything went back on exactly how it came apart, and it's not like I haven't done this before..... I think I just overspun it. 30 psi is alot of boost at this altitude and I really had to crank on the boost controller to get it up there.

So now I have to decide to get a GT30R or GT35R. I really wish I could have hit the dyno with this, but after logging boost curves I think I can get a good plot of what it would have done. I think this turbo would have landed right between the two, which is where I want to be.