<VV> No turbo boost

Geoff Haeger thehaegers at gmail.com
Wed Jun 10 15:06:04 EDT 2015


Hi guys, I’ve got a problem and am stumpted. I need some help. Last August I bought a 1963 Monza Spyder turbo. It had been Rotisserie restored by someone in 2009 and immediately sold on Barrett Jackson. The restoration included a newly rebuilt engine, turbo, transaxle and basically everything else was new! The buyer kept it until August 2012, where it was sold at the Silver auction in Reno at Hot August Nights to the guy I bought it from. I have no information about how many miles the first buyer put on the car or how the newly re-built motor was broken in. I bought it from the guy who bought it in 2012. He put less than 100 miles on the car. Here’s the problem: the turbo puts out little or no boost. I put one of Clarks good boost gauges on it and it reads 1-2 # boost under hard load in 3rd and 4th gears. The stock gauge pretty much shows the same thing. The engine runs fine. It has one of Grant Youngs carbs on it, and the distributor was set correctly. It has 120-130# compression. It runs exactly as a 145 CU engine with a 1 barrel carb should run. I put it on a chassis dyno and it’s getting 60-70 HP at the rear wheels, The torque is 110. The AF ratio is spot on at 12.5. I thought it had a bad turbo, so I bought a rebuilt one from Starr Cooke in El Cajon. His reads exactly as the original turbo did and performs the same. So It’s not the turbo. I have triple checked the exhaust system and there are no leaks! And all the piping and muffler is new. So, the only thing left is that the engine is not putting out enough exhaust pressure to run the turbo correctly and spin it up. So I am left with the thought that the wrong cam was installed when the engine was built, or the cam lobes were flatted by not using any zinc during the break-in. And I don’t know any way to check this without tearing down the engine. Do any of you agree with me? Or have any ideas I haven’t thought of? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Geoff Haeger


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