Apparently so!
The bearings on the left have possibly hundreds of thousands of miles on them, and were replaced by the bearings on the right about 15k miles ago....
The originally bearings were in decent condition but I bought a rebuild kit because it was smoking a lot.
Well, the rebuild didn't help so then I did this (among other things): https://www.rx7club.com/single-turbo-rx-7s-23/ever-wondered-damn-all-smoke-coming-my-motor-turbo-793269/

Well, that lasted for about 700 miles (running with it restricted JUST enough for it not to smoke).



And the banks upgraded compressor wheel with 15k miles on it:


And the exhaust turbine got chewed up because BOTH exhaust sleeves went though the turbo (melted):




This was all that was left of BOTH exhaust sleeves:

So now the old (but still decent) bearings are back in.
But honestly, thats not even why I took it off. I took it off because the was a crack in the custom turbo manifold, it was still boosting 10lbs with all the above destruction plus a large crack.

 

holy **** phil haha
get her back together!

 

I guess it's time for a bigger turbo

 

That's some cool destruction! Thanks for sharing. I hope you knew at the time that it was a bad idea right?

 

haha nice amount of damage

 

No problem, I try to entertain and inform :-)

And no, I didn't know that was gunna happen, I did not cut off the oil completely, just turned it down enough to make it not smoke.... The problem was that the turbo was not smoking because of too much oil, it was probably smoking because the return was ABOVE the feed...

 

Who installed your oil drain above your oil feed and why??

 

Glad to know it worked out in the end.

 

, you beat me to it!

At least you got some cool carnage out of it, and can be thankful it didn't eat your motor! Some lessons are best learned first hand .

 

Another fourm member (who would rather remain unnamed) put this together for me, it was the only way to really make it work... but it didn't work too well obviously. We're trying something else now, we rotated the center part, but of the 4 bolts that bolt both the exhaust and compressor housings on, only 2 line up.... So it may leak oil terribly or just fly apart, who knows. I don't have a whole lot to lose at this point.

 

Why don't you just tap the front cover for an oil return? That's the easiest place on an n/a motor to do it.

 

Ahhh, sorry my post must have been confusing.
The oil return on the motor side is fine, I have a T2 front cover.

Its the position on the oil return in relation to the feed on the turbo that I am having trouble with.
The turbo won't physically fit any other way, so we just rotated the center part 90deg, but were only able to use 2/4 bolts on each the front and rear of the turbo because the other 2 just didn't line up.

 

The oil drain needs to be 15º from vertical. If it isn't you will have oil leak through the turbine and destroy you turbo from lack of proper oil draining. If you can't, then you can try using an oil drain pump.

 

hmmm, by 15dog from verticle you mean stright up right? It CAN be pointing straight down right?

 

I don't think you got me completely. An oil drain pump woulden't really help my because the turbo is well above the oil level in the motor. The problem is that the oil return, as it comes out of the turbo, is above the feed.

 

That is wrong, and will never work. It'll smoke like hell. You've gotta figure some way to spin the cartridge so that the feed is ontop and the return is on the bottom.