Oil dripping out of my downpipe....
 

Recently I had a boost issue where I couldn't make it past 0 manifold pressure without the engine dancing around under the hood. So I bought new cuplinks and t-bolt clamps hoping that solved my problem. The car was down for a month and when I started it again it let out a ton of white smoke and started dripping oil from the secondary turbo area. I assumed it was the seals on the secondary and bought a used set and swapped them out this past weekend. I stuffed the engine back in and fired it up and the exact same problem started to happen but this time most of the oil seemed to be leaking out of exhaust gaskets and again with a ton of smoke.

Now I'm assuming I have internal oil seal problems in the engine which is pushing the oil through the turbos and out the exhaust.

Can anyone tell me if they have ever experienced this or if I'm on the right track? Thanks!

Well in my experience, oil in the boost pipes (ie any pipes that hold boost pressure from primary or secondary turbos) usually means the labrinth seals (bit like piston rings) inside the offending turbocharger are leaking.

Any oil that gets thrown out in the exhaust would surely be burnt up and produce smoke, due to the high heat of the turbo manifold. IF there was a large volume of oil in the exhaust, then you might see it coming out of exhaust gaskets, etc, as it all wouldnt burn up completely.

I see it two ways. You either have exhaust turbine seals leaking (hemorraging) in the turbo(s) or you have oil in the rotor housings that is making its way out the exhaust, surviving the heat of the turbo manifold and entering the exhaust system. But thats unlikely. I would put my 2 dollar bet on the turbocharger exhaust turbine seals leaking :)

I'd post up a video that will help a lot.

Also worth noting was this occurred after a "steam clean", and the smoke starts immediately from startup and continued for at least 20 minutes until the car was shut off.

Turbos were already replaced like he mentioned and the car still has the exact same symptoms.

I wanted to follow up on this thread just in case someone makes as many bone headed mistakes as I do when working on cars. I've only been a rotary guy for about a year and a half so there is a big learning curve here compared to piston engines. So my mistake..... After two sets of sequential turbo's and two engines I figured out I made a mistake in the vacuum lines. I have the HKS intake pipes and the smog pump removed. So I was trying to simplify the vacuum lines and get rid of unnecessary crap under the hood. I used Banzai's block off kit and it cleaned a lot of things up. My mistake was on the metal hard vac lines that run along the front of the engine. At the bottom of the those lines two of them run into the primary turbo's intake pipe. Well in all of my infinite wisdom I took a vacuum hose and routed it from one hard line back into the other hard line and I put two caps on the intake pipe where they were previously plumbed into. Well somehow that created a whole lot of oil pressure in the engine and the weakest link was in the turbos which pushed into the exhaust and looked like a wild fire around my car..... So if your having oil push out the exhaust or any other area like the oil filler neck and you changed anything at all in the routing of the vacuum lines, then that is more than likely your problem so go back and undo what you did and see if that fixes it. I swear I had smoke pluming out of my exhaust and then a buddy pointed it out and we re-plumed it back into the intake pipe and almost immediately the smoke in the exhaust stopped. I was dropped jawed amazed and irritated with myself that after three weeks of vacation, two turbo swaps, two engine pulls, and one engine swap it was just my lack of knowledge of the vacuum system on these lovely sequential turbo setup that I screwed up.

Yep, you basically capped off your PCV system. You'll get all kinds of fun with it capped off and you're not the first to do it :).

Glad you found the solution, sucks it involved a lot of work!

Dale