EG-prince

---- you **** bag.

swiftT

me?? i ---- your mother stupid bitch

Tom-Guy

No you didn't, his mom's been with me all week. ------- n00bs.

swiftT

JFK78

I really don't ever come on here, but I just happened to see this and thought I'd comment.

I have never advocated the use of the Ebay turbos, I simply just made the mistake of telling everyone what I was really running. Should've said it was a Garrett 57trim, that would've saved me from the countless IM's and e-mails from people wanting to know which one it is, who I bought it from, etc. I've steered every last one of these away from the Ebay variant.

As for my experience with it, the 1st one I ran for ~1 1/2 yrs and it did OK, but would intermittently smoke and when it did, it was bad. Then it would just go away and not smoke again for a long time - very odd. That one made 442whp @ 29psi and we went 10.8's @ 131-133mph on it. It finally started smoking constantly, and we had another one laying around that was measured and found to be identical, so we put that one on. NO OTHER changes were made to the car or the tune, and it made 471+whp @ 29psi and we went 10.4-10.5 @ 138-139mph on it.

AFR's even stayed the same - the power difference between the two was strictly due to engine/turbocharger efficiency differences related to the thrust bearing damage/wear that we found in the old unit, and the related higher backpressure in the turbine housing as well as changing clearances between the compressor wheel and housing due to excessive shaft movement fore and aft. This is why you'll see lower than normal power output from a bad turbo at the same pressure level in the IM, even if the compressor wheel hasn't contacted the housing yet.

That entire setup is now on another one of our Vitara builds that is daily driven, and the turbo is still going strong. We plan on pushing that build to 29psi as well this year and seeing how it does, since it's a full Z6(better head), and unlike my Y8 which was 75mm and .006-.008 P2W, this Z6 motor is 75.5mm bore running a tight .0025 P2W clearance. I've got a different flavor of Vitara build from the norm going into my car for this year.

We've installed or worked on 100's of cars with various Ebay turbos, and best as I can tell, they run about 40% chance of being bad immediately (within minutes or days).
The other 60%, half will do fine for 3-6months, the other half will run for a good long time, as long as any quality brand turbo. Those are terrible odds.

Tom-Guy

I must disagree slightly, and keep in mind I do so respectfully. The last time I ever communicated with you was on HT, and you were very pro-china turbos. It has been 1.5+ years, though.

vadimkaG

I got mine from BLAAST and I have it for about a year now running 17psi every day and its like new still.

danz

very valid point.

JFK78

I do vaguely remember that, although I can't recall any details. I'm sure that my angle was different back then - I'm guessing I probably said something along the lines of "cheap turbo for a cheap build = good" and that we had seen pretty good things out of them. Do you recall what I said? I really can't recall encouraging anyone to use an Ebay turbo over a Garrett, etc if they could afford the real deal.

Having more time and experience with them since that time, I guess my rating of them has declined overall. It seems to me that they held up better 1-2yrs ago, but it could be all in my head. The 2 that I used personally did extremely well, but you can't even get a real 57trim on Ebay anymore. I was indeed very impressed that they were able to hold up to that kind of shaft speed and make the power.

Tom-Guy

I remember putting my $0.02 in and then not arguing further. Also, there are several different turbo clone factories in china, and the quality of their turbos varies run to run. I'm sure the turbo quality is all over the place, none quite as good as the OE manufacturers.