A few weeks ago, my upper intercooler hose blew off at the throttlebody. I pulled over and put it back on and tightened the hose clamps. I noticed it felt kind of spongy. Last week at an autocross, it blew off again and split a little. This time, I noticed there was a good bit of oil on it, thus the sponginess. Both times I was at 11 psi. I've been noticing lately that the turbo seems to chatter a bit when I let off the throttle, and it's audible above the noise of the BOV.
Today, I went for a drive, and when I came back, I started taking the hoses off.
There was oil in the intercooler. So I looked where I'd had problems before, and sure enough,
there was oil in the throttle body. Down a bit,
there was oil on the transmission, which I'd cleaned off good back in January. I fiugre it either got blown there after dripping out of the lower IC hose, or from
where the upper hose meets the throttlebody. 30 minutes later, the oil pool in the IC
had gotten bigger, probably from the oil the poor thing is trying to shove up the tubes draining back down. There's even
oil before the inlet. There's a fair amount of shaft play, too, but it doesn't seem like the vanes are hitting the housing.
I'm used to oil leaks--I've also got a V6--but this turbo is a rebuild that's just 4 months old, and I'm losing a quart every 1000 miles or so. I had a valve job done on the head when I put the turbo on and inspected it myself (and replaced all the lifters), so I don't think that big blue cloud that comes out my tailpipe every morning is coming from the valves. Do Mitsu turbos usually do this, or is this thing dying? If so, is there anything I can do to prolong its life? I use Mobil 1, so would switching back to dino oil slow the leakage down?
TurboDodge.com 
