I know that some oil normal but was wondering about, well, 'normal'. The following picture was taken after the intercooler was left to drain for a few hours. I cleaned out the existing oil before installation 1200 miles ago. This is not a daily driver and most of those miles involved plenty of boosting on the stock twins while tuning my PFC. Twins have 52k miles and no pretty much no shaft play.

 

Hm, I just had my IC off to do a small battery install... I didn't have any oil in my IC. Stock twins with about 25k miles on the turbos. Nice IC, looks like an M2 medium

 

thats a lot oil bro...you should check your turbo's for damage

 

IMO, it's a multi-part issue/diagnosis.

Part 1: Amount of oil
Part 2: Interval of check
Part 3: Type of driving

i.e. if you have that much oil in there from 7-8k or less miles of street driving, I'd say you have a problem. If it's from about 30-40k miles, some of it hard driving, I wouldn't necessarily call it a problem yet.

 

When Rick at Rick's Rotary was changing some stuff on my car he told me I had a bit of oil also. He said the problem was my primary turbo is leaking.

 

The IC is an M2/ASP large. As mentioned above, this represents 1200 miles with lots of boosting for tuning (probably 500+ 20-80mph WOT runs).

My primary turbo has pretty much zero shaft play and I see no smoke out the rear when boosting. Is this still compatible with significant oil leakage?

 

I wouldn't worry about it until you see smoke coming through the tailpipe. But if you feel saucy and see a good deal on turbos now's not a bad time to consider it.

I'll bet you could go for thousands of miles just like this before you even see enough oil to make smoke.

Dave

 

That's not a lot of oil, IMO. And it may be a sign that the IC is really working well, and that it is "filtering" the oil out of the intake air stream.

Dave

 

Ooooo never thought of it that way.

 

If you still run the stock PCV system, it looks normal.

Jack

 

its normal!.. the stock pcv system will cause oil in the intake and i/c . the turbos spin at such a high speed that oil suspends in the air and falls out of suspension when the turbos stop spinning so it collects in the i/c. clean out the i/c with carb cleaner and your good to go. I think your turbos are fine. the oil in the pic looks dirty . you should change your oil more.

Jeff

 

I like the way you rationalize. Is my exhaust "filtering" out some coolant every time I start up, too?

 

Oil in the intake lubes the apex seals.

That isn't that much oil. In my experience and usage of FDs most of the oil I got in my IC and intake tract was from autocrossing. The stock breather can vent oil back into the primary turbo intake during hard cornering.

 

Might not work in your exhaust, Dave, but...

What I meant by "filtering" is that a good IC has lots of surface area, and relatively slow internal flow rates, so that more air-suspended oil would be able to contact the inner surfaces of the IC and stay attached, eventually draining to the bottom.

The same principle is used in attracting dirt to the convoluted surfaces of foam or other oiled air filter elements.

Dave