When taking apart my intercooler piping yesterday and removing the intercooler, I found a decent amout of oil (enough to turn the intercooler flat and have a slow drip of oil come out) inside. Is this normal for our cars? and if not where could the source of the problem be?

 

Over time some oil can build up in the charge piping due to the crankcase ventilation system. Excessive oil buildup can be indicative of a problem, but it really depends how much oil has built up over a given period of time. If your car is barely modified and nobody has ever cleaned out the intercooler then I would expect to see more oil in there. If the intercooler was recently removed and a lot of oil built up in that short period of time then you could have turbos on their way out.

Recently I helped a friend pull the intercooler off his 2005 STi. The engine (60k on it) has never been modifed and the intercooler appeared to have never been removed up to that point. You could see that oil had collected in there a little bit.

If you are doing emissions reduction you can install a catch can to collect the blowby oil instead. As for now though I would keep driving the car and monitor for other signs of bad turbos such as shaft play and smoking.

 

The car does smoke when is started cold, but then goes away once the car has warmed up.......

 

empty it and then check on it again in after a week's worth of driving.