club.liberty.asn.au

Hi everyone,

Over the last couple of weeks, I've noticed my engine is blowing a bit of smoke through the exhaust at the lights when it's idling. At first I thought it was just due to the cold weather, but last night when I was going through a drive thru on a mild night, I noticed there was quite a bit of smoke behind me. Smoke seems to be white coloured, not blue or anything like that. Apart from that, car seems to run fine - smooth idle, same power it's always had. Any idea what this might be?

The idea that's been thrown around so far is turbo. If it's a turbo, I'm lead to believe Kinugawa replacement TD04-HLA, but my mechanic lead me to believe he's had some grief with these and had a quite a few units fail (but he was just talking about Taiwanese turbos in general) - can anyone comment on the quality of the Kinugawa turbos?

First things first.
Check your oil isn't over full. If it's overfull it can lead to smoke out the exhaust like you're experiencing

2nd thing would be pull the inlet off and check for shaft play and oil in the compressor housing, then pull the dump and see if there's any oil in the turbine housing etc.
Also would probably be worth doing a compression test to make sure it hasn't cracked a ring land.

Many people on this forum are running, or have run the Kinugawa turbos with great success. I can't recall any failures, but I could be wrong.

I'd start with replacing the idle.

Could be the pcv is blocked, pressurising the crank case in turn pushing oil past the turbo bearings.
Pcv cleaning or replacement is a tmic off job and a great opp to check/replace/upgrade the throttlebody hose, inlet and see how much oil is in those bits.