Has anyone successfully used a Turbosmart OPR V2 alongside an oil pressure gauge to verify pressure to the turbo?

About a year ago, I attempted to use one. Following recommendations, I installed the optional 100 psi mechanical oil pressure gauge. At idle, everything looked perfect, so I took the car for a quick test drive—less than half a mile—with a single 2nd gear pull. After pulling into the garage, I checked the gauge, and to my surprise, it read 0 psi. Obviously, that freaked me out a little.

Thinking it was a faulty gauge, I ordered a replacement from Turbosmart and repeated the exact same process. Same result—0 psi again! At the time, it was more of a “nice-to-have,” and since I was swamped, I pulled it off and moved on.

Recently, I decided to revisit the issue, assuming I had blown both gauges. But after bench testing them, they both work perfectly—meaning my turbo was legitimately getting 0 psi. I checked the internal filter through the 1/8 NPT hole, and it looked completely clean, as expected. The OPR had only been on the car for about 30 minutes of total run time, with just over a mile of driving.

I’m currently in discussion with Turbosmart support, but so far, no answers. My oil pressure at full tilt reaches close to 130 psi, which is decent—though not unusual for a heavily modified 13B REW.

So, I’m really curious—has anyone else had experience with this product? Also, if you're running one without a mechanical oil pressure gauge or aren't logging oil pressure to your ECU, you should seriously reconsider until you verify that it's actually working as intended.

 

i have run both the V1 and V2. my V2 has been on my car for at least a year. i haven't verified pressure but my turbo is fine.

how bout disconnecting it at the turbo, with a helper start the engine and see what happens.

thanks for sharing

 

I'll honestly trust the gauge. I've determined it gets pressure when the pressure is low but it doesn't seem to like 130 psi of oil pressure. Based on my 2 tests, I'm guessing the pressure would have come back after letting it sit for a few.

 

If the regulator is set fighting cold oil pressure and doesn't have a small bypass orifice or minimum seat clearance it could very easily completely seal against warm oil pressure.

I feel turbo oil feed should be KISS, restrictor orifice from a feed preferably after the main oil filter. Any dead head regulator or filter you put in line is asking to fail a turbo, unless you want to run an oil pressure sensor just for turbo oil inlet for a warning. I don't really fancy trying to undo and reconnect oil lines in a hot engine bay on the side of the riad if it flags a fault though.

I think they are a solution/new problem looking for a problem that isn't one.

 

Just my two cents here, I don’t run these, and that’s straight from my engine builder’s recommendation. I tried to install one on my setup, but Tim (my builder) refused as he’s old school and firmly believes the restrictor supplied by the turbo manufacturer (Garrett, in my case) is all that’s needed. His take is that adding another restrictor could end up starving the turbo/engine of oil, especially at high RPMs/high boost when flow is critical. For context, based on real world results I’ve been running my setup for 5 years with just the Garrett-supplied restrictor with over 400 100-200 pulls and the turbo is still going strong. No signs of oil-related issues.

To me, this product seems more like a band-aid for setups where turbos keep failing due to incorrect oil restrictors or excessive oil pressure and not a must-have for everyone. So if your setup is working fine you dont need this piece.

Curious to hear other thoughts though, anyone actually seen measurable benefits from running one of these? Or issues that were solved only by adding it?

In regards to your 0 psi oil pressure issue, are you looking at the stock oil pressure gauge or do you have an oil pressure sensor connected to your ecu and verified via logs?

 

I think most turbo failures are from not enough oil flow or damaging seals front and rear from drains that don't flow/get kinked. The square root orifice flow law is all you need to stop too much flow/pressure in the housing from the feed side.

I'll put it this way, excavators and shovels on mine sites with powerpacks worth millions of dollars which may not have on site spares generally don't have any bullshit like that on the turbo feeds (if thete is any filtration it will be pressure bypass type), they do 20,000hr engine rebuilds after running hard on boost nearly the whole time. You are probably talking $1m+ an hour coal loss without considering operating losses on downtime with these machines, potentially multiples of that depending on the operation.

 

The pressure reading is on the OPR itself. Just like a fuel pressure regulator, it has a 1/8 npt port on the output side. I just wanted to verify it was working before using it, which is what the instructions recommended so I just used the turbosmart mechanical gauge they sell as an option. Theoretically, this reading should never be greater then 40 psi regardless of the pressure on the input side.

Engine oil pressure was great at all time. For these 2 quick pulls, oil temps were fully warmed up. Pressure on the OPR was what you would expect until after it saw high oil pressure.

 

Can you strip the regulator and take photos of the inside of both end caps and any porting on the piston.

Description of range of motion/limits of piston movement relative to bith if you can work it out.


Any evidence of gauling?

 

Took the opr apart, which was super simple. I didn't take a picture. There was really nothing to see. No gauling and no marks at all on the walls of the opr. Looks completely new as it should. I also inspected the filter. Completely clean. Pushing the piston against the spring into cap was no problem. The piston has a oring around it and was in perfect shape. The only way the walls would be marked up is if there was something wrong with the oring which is what makes contact against the walls.

I can take it apart again if someone really wants pictures. It's really easy to take apart.

 

primarily wanted to understand areas exposed to engine/downstream/atmospheric pressure and how flow is restricted, assuming an O-ring sweeps across an orifice?

 

Borg Warner EFR turbos have built in restrictor orifices, but they recommend feeding the turbo/restrictor with less than 80psi of oil pressure. Their engineers said to use a Turbosmart OPR to reduce the extremely high oil pressure in a rotary.

I have not looked into Garrett oil pressure requirements.

Im using the OPR V2 with an EFR that I just fired up.

 

Cool, do you have a gauge on the OPR?

 

I do not. Turbosmart makes great products and I know a lot of people who have been using the OPR for years with no issue, so I didn't see a reason to. For S&G I might throw an in-line pressure sensor or gauge and see what it reads.

 

Update - I recently had my car apart doing some maintenance and decided to add the OPR back in. I no longer think there is an issue with the OPR. The low oil pressure I was seeing at the OPR had nothing to do with my drive and high oil pressure. After actually paying closer attention, the reading gets lower as the oil heats up. The reading there in general, is substantially lower then the reading at the oil filter pedestal. Has anyone measured oil pressure at the port that feeds the turbo oil? Does this port simply have lower oil pressure?

I made a video of my oil pressure readings if anyone is interested. Sorry for the quality. It's not great.

 

The oil pressure from the port on the front iron should be measured pressure anywhere. Remember, in stock form that line is unobstructed into the twins. To test the opr fully, you would need pre and post readings to determine if gauge pressure is whats going in or coming out.

 

I agree that i need to measure oil pressure before the OPR to test fully. Conceptually, there has to be a pressure drop across the engine. Maybe the drop at the front iron is more then expected? When i have time, I'm going to see if I can jerry rig something to get a pre and post reading at the opr. It's August in Arizona. I have nothing better to do. I'm not planning on driving the car for at least another month or so.

 

It's not a pressure drop from front to rear. People SHOULD NOT be measuring oil pressure in the OEM location. We made a pedestal to rectify this issue, you SHOULD be measuring oil pressure POST oil filter, the OEM location is PRE filter.

 

My engine oil pressure sensor is in this location. Post filter in a FFE pedestal. This topic is about the oil pressure i am seeing post Turbosmart OPR. At idle, when the oil is fully warmed up, the oil pressure post OPR is very low. Much lower then the oil pressure at the pedestal. If you watch the video for example, at a idle of 1100 rpm, with a oil temp of 190+, oil pressure at the pedestal is around 30 psi. Oil pressure post OPR is around 5 psi.

 

It's operating exactly as as you would expect for a bias applied area restrictor device without an external reference face or spring/force element would be expected to behave.

If you are concerned do an oil flow check into a bottle and confirm if it meets the turbo supplier volume flow requirements.

Remember your turbo load and heat flux should be orders of magnitude lower at idle and the shaft/bearings shouldn't be flinging like they could at high speed if there isn't enough supply to fill the housing.

 

First off, big thanks to everyone who’s chimed in—I really appreciate the insights. I’ll admit I might be overthinking things, but I’m also genuinely curious, and figured I’d share what I’ve found in case it helps anyone else down the line.

As Slides mentioned, this likely isn’t a concern at idle. The Turbosmart OPR is doing its job, capping oil pressure at 40 PSI under load, which I can clearly confirm when revving.

Since I was already deep in the rabbit hole, I decided to dig through my spare fittings and managed to rig up a setup to get a pressure reading before the OPR. I temporarily hard-mounted the Turbosmart liquid-filled gauge to the front cover port—not ideal, I know—but it worked for a quick test. There’s probably some variance between gauges, and hard-mounting isn’t perfect, but I made a video with what I had on hand.

There’s definitely a noticeable pressure drop between the pre- and post-OPR readings. It’s most pronounced when the oil is cold and gradually evens out as it warms up. Apologies in advance for the video quality—it’s rough, but hopefully still useful.