And now the photo coverage REALLY thins out. Hunger, exhaustion and fading sunlight played a role in this.

Next up: install the TURBO!

First, attach the oil drain hose to the turbo, then lower it down unto the turbo feed pipe. There's a steel gasket that goes between the feed pipe and the turbine inlet. Four bolts and nuts secure the turbo in place.




There's some tight spaces in there to get the nuts started. Once all of the nuts are started, it's a two person job to snug them up. One person on top with an open-ended wrench, and another person below with a socket wrench and a LONG extension. We used three 6" extensions.




DO NOT FULLY TIGHTEN!

See the common theme here? All of the exhaust hardware should still be loose, and the turbo mounting hardware should remain loose now.


Now that the turbo is in place, there's a couple things that can be routed to their final locations:
1) Oil feed line needs to be routed nicely and attached to the turbo.
2) That coolant hose that's been dangling off to the side can now get routed around the turbo, then up to the T-fitting back at the heater core.

I'll have to take pictures of final locations of things in my install and post them later for reference.


The air filter gets installed through the wheel well:




Then everything with the turbo/exhaust gets connected/tightened in a certain order. Learn from my mistakes:

1) Re-attach the inner fender liner (that you partially removed to install the air filter). This is important because you need to make sure the air filter is not contacting the fender as you tighten things down. I didn't realize the importance of this step and instead left the fender liner out of the way for better access to stuff. My air filter now touches my fender liner and I'll have to spend the time some day to loosen EVERYTHING, then tighten it all again while applying pressure as necessary to guide things into a better position.

2) Attach turbo to down pipe with a big clamp. The turbo and down pipe need to be nearly perfectly mated to each other before the clamp will go on. We had a lot of trouble getting this to happen. Thinking back, there's a couple possibilities for out trouble:
a) The exhaust pipes had gotten tightened to the engine before I remembered that we were not supposed to tighten anything yet. It took a long time to get them all tightened due to tight spaces, so we decided to leave them tightened because they seemed to have no wiggle room for their final location anyway. We should have taken the time to loosen the bolts to get some wiggle room for getting OTHER components connected.
b) I MIGHT have already tightened the bolts below the alternator that mount the down pipe brackets. i really can't remember now. Don't do that.
c) Remember back when I said I had to grind the end of the bracket that mounts the turbo feed pipe to the engine? I only ground it just enough to get it to barely fit. I think I should have ground it down more to give some more wiggle room for the position of that pipe.

3) Tighten exhaust to the engine heads.

4) Tighten the turbo to the platform of the turbo feed pipe (paying attention to location of air filter to avoid contact with anything nearby).

5) Tighten down pipe to extension pipe.

6) Tighten stock exhaust clamp (which holds the extension pipe).

7) Tighten the remaining two exhaust connections that hold the crossover pipe and passenger head pipe to the turbo feed pipe.

Remember to double check the orientation of the flanges for the exhaust connections to avoid interference with suspension components, avoid reducing ground clearance, and to ensure that you can actually reach the bolts/nuts from both sides with tools to tighten them. We ended up using a socket extension and even a universal joint to reach some of them. Also, tighten all those ball joints TIGHT, or else you will have exhaust leaks.


And now attach the oil drain hose to the oil pan. Be sure to hold the base of the oil pan fitting with a wrench or similar to avoid twisting it in the oil pan.




I zip-tied the oil drain hose to that radiator hose up front to prevent it from swinging toward the exhaust pipe.