Toasted Turbo Final Chapter

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Jun 25, 1999 | 06:15 AM

Jim Torongo

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Toasted Turbo Final Chapter

The TT is back on the road and runs great. The turbo failure is still a bit of a mystery however I talked with several people at the dealer and so I believe I know what happened based on all their comments. It appears that a piece of the Turbo housing broke off and was ingested thus causing the impeller shaft to bend. This in turn prevented the turbine from spinning freely (it was rubbing against the housing) which caused a total lack of flow on the intake side and therefore no rev's and no power. I assume that the KKK (German supplier of turbos for Audi) turbo housing is a 'high pressure aluminum casting'and that there was a 'flaw'in th casting which caused the problem. As you know race engine builders do not put any metal parts in thier motors without first testing for flaws or cracks this is true even of brand new high quality components. Magnuluxing is done on ferrous metels and ziglow testing of non-ferrous metals such as aluminum. These processes are far too exspensive for 'production cars' and thus are not done. The point is that a number of brand new parts will fail all be it a very small number. Failures such as these can be due to engineering errors where the design of a part can contribute to flaws but most of the time they are just anomalies. Further the TT does not have a 'design problem' because of a failure like the one that occured in my car. JIM