Ok, first I want to thank everyone who posted links to help me on my last post. The vacuum line replacement went pretty well. After giving everything a once over I found that the "I" and "J" soliniods seemed to be switched. The car came to life until you are up on about 6 lbs of boost and then you downshift and really put it under a load. The boost seems to remain at 5lbs and there is a noticable rattle in the front exhaust. I stopped the car and babied it back to the shop. I am thinking the secondary turbo is shot. The turbos have 120,000 miles on them. I think it is something like $3400 for a new replacement turbo. What options does my buddy have? I don't think he would complain about a performance upgrade BUT he doesn't need anything major. He enjoys driving his car way too much to throw away reliability. I figure I will be in on the deal and I have done upgrades on everything from Syclones to Eclipses.
Thanks for any ideas,
Mike Grady

 

If you are not seeing up to 10 psi under 4500 rpms then you probably have a leak in one of the couplings from the turbos to the engine. The most common to fail is the coupling right out of the turbo Y=pipe. I had to replace mine because I found a 2" gash in it. From what I have heard, the primary turbo should go bad before the secondary (10 to 1 the secondary has just a control problem). In the worst case a rebuild will cost around 500$. Even if your primary is running fine.... there are a lot of things that could cause a secondary not to run. What is your boost curve? I know I did the silicone hose job w/o fixing my boost problem. I didn't look towards it like it would.... I checked all my hoses a while ago and they were fine. I just did the hose job cuz I had the engine apart and it would be easier. Now what I failed to do is test all the solenoids, that is what I think my problem was. Just to give you an idea.

 

Did you re-intall the restrictor pills back into the lines that run to the actuators?