A few years ago I "inherited" my son's twin turbo Subaru, and love it, but my creaky old knees struggle with the heavy duty clutch, especially in traffic. A few weeks ago I found another, low mileage automatic beasty going ridiculously cheap on FB MP because it had a blown turbo, so as I had a spare turbo in my garage, I lowballed the seller some more, we agreed on a price a fair bit less than he wanted, and I had it towed back to my place.
I spent the next week or so removing/installing the old/new turbo's, and cursing Subaru for stuffing 50 pounds of crap into a 5 pound bag. The amount of things that I had to remove just to get to the turbo to remove it, then all the other things I had to remove to get the good turbo in was mind boggling. What was hilarious was that Nelson, the Chinese guy I bought it from, had driven the car for several miles with the blown turbo, so the intercooler and exhaust was full of oil. I dumped the intercooler in a big tub of water based degreaser and used a submersible pump to flush it out, over several days, then flushed it with water.
I dropped the front section of the exhaust off to wrestle the good turbo into place, and oil just poured out onto my concrete driveway. Fcuk. Anyway, I managed to install the good turbo, then installed a new battery, did an oil and filter change, replaced the air filter, fuel filter (in tank, what a PITA) drilled the thermostat, replaced the coolant, and summoned up the courage to attempt to start it. Surprisingly, it started right up, which made me happy, because I had no idea of the engine condition until then.
The problem of an exhaust system full of oil manifested immediately. Within seconds of starting it, the smoke blocked out the sun. Fcuk. I switched it off, and prayed for a strong wind, to disperse the smoke. One of my greatest fears materialised when the siren from the fire station less than a mile from my place sounded, and I could hear a fire truck coming my way. In hindsight, creating heaps of smoke on a 37 degree C (close enough to 100 degrees F) day probably wasn't that smart, but luckily for me, by the time the fire truck slowly cruised past my place, the smoke had cleared, and I didn't get in the sh1t.
I did wonder how I was going to sort the problem, and probably around 3am, I had an epiphany. Next morning I drove over to the hardware store and bought a big dust extractor, and ran the pipe thru a big tub full of water, which seemed to work quite well.
Once I'd run it for about an hour, and "burped" the cooling system I took it for a drive around the block, but the smoke hadn't completely gone away, so the next morning I woke up very early before most cars were out on the road and drove it 120 miles. I really didn't need to drive it 120 miles, the smoke had cleared after the first 10 miles or so, but it was just so much fun to drive, this thing has around 300 BHP @ 14 psi, in a compact little car. I still need to jump through some legal hoops to get it back on the road, but hopefully it'll be registered and running around town in a couple of weeks.
