Turbo Install
New TEC Turbo going in
After my first truck got wrecked I bought this one to drive for a while. The engine had some skipping to it and I figured it would be no big deal. That is until it started not starting after it was warmed up. So I took it in and had it looked at (mind you this is before I started doing my own work). Little did I know at the time, this truck had a stock turbo. Come to find out the stock CT-20 is a piece of junk and usually goes bad by 100k miles and I was at 119k. The turbo had been pouring oil into the intake manifold for quite some time and needed to be replaced. Well I didn't have the money to pay the shop to do it and I didn't want to get another stock turbo, so I started looking,
What I found was Turbo Engineering Corp. They sell a turbo upgrade kit that includes the turbo, and all new exhaust, and some other things. I ordered up the unit and got it the next week because the just happened to have one sitting in the shop ready to go.
Starting off my first ever fairly major engine work I was a little nervous. I just read the instructions and stuff and started in on the work. I had the old turbo out by the end of Friday night and everything ready to go to put the new one in Saturday. Saturday brought some struggles to get this thing mounted squeezed in past everything and then bolted up. then came the fun task of putting on the oil return line. Major pain. I ended up having my dad hold the new turbo while I lightly bolted the oil hose to the block and then to the turbo and then we rotated the turbo up into place. Getting the exhaust on was the next challenge.
The other major pain in the project was the exhaust down tube. There is zero room to get the wrench in on the bolts to hole the tube to the turbo, but we got it eventually. Sunday morning brought reconnecting stuff and filling the fluids and the start up. After priming the engine with oil by disconnecting the coil wire, the engine fired right up. We let it warm up and then shut it down to start work on the rest of the exhaust. Laying this out was a little confusing. It was the first time my dad and I had worked on exhaust. Luckily it was just like a big jigsaw puzzle of 90 degree bent tubing and strait tube, so 
we got it figured out, made new hangers, and it was off to the test drive. Turbo performed great after the break-in period. Still hate that stupid automatic transmission tho.
