Oil past turbo seal, seal still good?

[95burgundyesi]

If oil is pushed through the turbo seal and smokes, will that seal stilll be usuable and with proper oiling reseat and hold pressure or is it instantly damaged?

 

[talondave]

It might be alright depends on how long you ran it with to much oil pressure! I had a turbo that i installed and it smoked from the ofh, so i switched to feed off the head and it seemed to be fine for about 2000 miles until i sold it.

 

[Killa_dsm]

Just like talondave said. I had the exact same problem with my PTE with a new oil seal in it. When it was fed from the ofh it would blow smoke but once I moved it to the head I had zero problems. I have quite a bit of miles on it now and no problems at all. How long have you been driving it while it was blowing smoke?

 

[JusMX141]

Dave's right on. If you've ran it blowing oil past the turbine seal for an extended period of time the seal groove on the turbine shaft will fill with carbon from the burnt oil residue. The carbon will stack upon itself until it begins to wear the seal from the bottom out. I've seen older 14B's that had no shaft play at all which suffered from oil coking in the turbine seal groove. The groove was so full of carbon that the seal had been worn paper-thin and lost it's spring tension.

In some rare cases I've seen the oil and carbon cause the turbine seal to stick in the turbine shaft, causing the seal to spin inside the housing instead of staying fixed in the housing. This would also cause the turbo to burn copious amounts of oil no matter where the oil source was coming from.

 

[95burgundyesi]

Well when it pushed oil past the seal it was only for a few seconds, I would say the turbo has smoked only at idle 4 times for a total of less than 2 minutes. I have the turbo off the car and am working on getting the snap ring off to position the compressor housing, and wanted to make sure the seal still was good. Doesnt smoke and never has at WOT. I think oil was sitting in the CHRA and then being pushed out at idle because of my angle of the outlet.