NOTE:
in these instructions I will not go into any detail as to how to remove the stock turbo as there are many different setups, and my install was not stock typical, but as for some pointers to help save some time, one trick that I use to remove the stock primary cat with out having to remove the AC compressor is on the stock primary CAT there are two studs and three bolts that hold it in place. The ends of the studs have a star end on them so that a 6mm 12pt. socket will fit quite nicely on them, and if you have taken care of them and use your antisieze as you should, then it will be fairly easy to remove both of them. This will allow you to remove the CAT with out having to pull the AC because the main reason that the AC has to be pulled is because of the brace or "stay" that is used to hold it in place on that side. With the studs out you should be able to pull the CAT out with out having to remove the brace. It works for me. :)
ALSO NOTE:
I would highly suggest that you read all the way through these instructions at least once before beginning the work.
TOOLS USED
I mention most of the specific tools that I used in the text of the procedure. For this again, the selection of tools is what ever you happen to have on hand and also there are no special tools required for this, so in this case I will just say that a good selection of metric tools should be available, as I have said before the MR2 can just about be taken completely apart with only 10mm 12mm 14mm 17mm sockets and or wrenches and a phillips screw driver.
PROCEDURES
The kit appears to be complete, at least the one I got had everything that I needed to install it, with a few exceptions that I will go into now.
NOTE: WARNING:
First off, there are three long (about 2 inch) SS bolts and nuts that come with the kit that are used (what appears) to be for the coupling of the new down pipe to the stock or what ever exhaust you have. The problem I ran into was that as I was (beginning) to torque down the bolts ( I was checking my exhaust for fit) so I needed to remove the bolts and make some adjustments, well I went to remove them and found that the nut had welded itself to the bolt, such that I had to actually twist the head of the bolt off in order to get it out. I have never seen a bolt/nut combo do this before, so what I had to do was go over to my local ACE hardware store and get some 3/8 inch SAE fine thread SS bolts/ nuts, and lock washers, and use them. Something to watch out for. Of course I will at this point assume that your stock turbo is out and you are ready to install the Greddy TD-06 20G SH kit.
One of the first things you will need to do is to install the oil feed line. In the kit there is an adapter with I believe 18mm on one end and 1/8 NPT on the other end. The adapter is labeled #6 on page 10 of the install booklet. This adapter goes where the LARGE oil feed banjo bolt went, (into the block). There is a large copper crush washer that goes with this. Since the area is really easy to get at then I did not pre-assemble the adapter fitting and the oil feed SS hose, I put them on separately. First clean around the hole in the block and make sure that there is no dirt or oil around where the copper washer is going to seal. Put the copper washer on the adapter and then start screwing it into the hole, it uses the same sized socket as the oil feed banjo bolt takes (27mm) so get the socket/adapter/shaft/and torque wrench combo that you need and torque the adapter down, I torqued it down to 30 ft. lbs as the torque used on the stock banjo bolt is 38, I thought that the adapter did not have as many threads as the stock bolt does, and to be a bit on the safe side I reduced the torque by 8 ft. lbs. I have had no leaks at all so far. I then fed on the fitting end (either end on the SS hose, they are the same) and using a 14mm wrench, tighten it down.
NOTE:
now be careful with this fitting, it is easy to over torque it, my calibrated wrist says that it needs only to be good and snug, not torqued out of orbit. :) I have had no oil leaks. :)
Now you will want to install the oil return fitting this is labeled #9 and the gasket #22 on page 10 of the booklet. There are also two bolts, along with lock washers and nuts that are used to screw down this fitting. The bolts, if you lay them all out in their respective sizes it is fairly easy to see which ones are required for this fitting. For this sized bolt you can torque with a torque wrench but I just snugged them down good, for this sized bolt and the material it is going into and not to completely crush the gasket, I would guesstimate about 10 foot lbs. of torque would be good.
Now to proceed with the turbo install: I found it just as easy to install the main pieces one at a time rather than assembling them all and then installing them. The specific technique you use is strictly up to you but I had no difficulty at all doing them one at a time. So to begin, there are four studs in the kit, you will notice that one end of the stud is shorter thread than the other end, this shorter end is the end that you screw into the exhaust adapter piece. Now you can choose to double nut them and torque them down into the adapter piece but I did not do this, we'll see if that strategy pays off in the end. when you have the studs in the adapter then you are ready to install it on to the exhaust manifold. The kit does not supply the studs for the adapter to mate to the stock exhaust manifold, it assumes that you are using the existing ones or you have bought new ones. So also with the nuts, and the stock exhaust manifold turbo gasket, the kit assumes that you are either re-using the old ones or you have purchased new ones. So once you have all of these items in place, then you are ready to mate the adapter piece to the exhaust manifold. For these stud/nut combos I used some antisieze compound and then mated the adapter to the manifold.
NOTE: at this point one area that I had a problem with was that the adapter piece did not have any relief for a socket to fit onto the nuts, kind of after a a fashion I was able to get a short socket to fit on three of the nuts but there was the fourth one which I could not. So what I needed to do was to turn the adapter around so that the nut that I could not get a socket on was on the top so that I could easily get an openend wrench on it. So you will need to watch for this.
After you have the gasket, adapter and nuts on then torque them down as best you can I was able to torque three of them and had to guess with the fourth (calibrated hand/wrench). I used about 30 ft. lbs of torque on these.
NOTE:
when you get ready to put the turbo up in place, make sure that the oil feed SS line is over out of the way as much as possible, it should be pointing towards the drivers side of the car, and rear.
You are ready to put the turbo on, make sure you have the gasket provided in the kit, slide the gasket provided onto the adapter and then push it all the way down. Now I was able to get it to stay in place while I slipped the turbo on but if you can not then simply use a couple of pieces of masking tape or the tape of your choice, and tape it up in place then put the turbo on and hold it or have someone help you and then put one of the lock washers and nuts on and screw it down hand tight. This will hold the turbo in place while you put on the other three washers and bolts. NOTE: if you use tape to hold the gasket don't forget to remove it before you torque the bolts down. :)
NOTE:
It may be easier to just start one of the nuts, and don't bother with the lock washer then when you have that one nut on holding the turbo up in place, then you can put on one of the lock washer/nut combos and then remove the single nut, and put the lock washter/nut combo on that stud, then of course put on the remaining two nut/washer(s) and then torque them down. Now for this I had to just guess at the torque, I put them down snug I would guess that the torque was around 25 to 30 ft. lbs. I will check them again in a week, to make sure that nothing has come loose.
I will assume at this point that you have all of the lockwasher/nuts on and the turbo is setting in place on the adapter, which is in place on the exhaust manifold. Now we are ready to install the other end of the oil feed line, there is in the kit a banjo bolt, a fitting that the banjo bolt fits through and two copper crush washers. This is #5 as listed in the TRUST instruction booklet on page 10. The 1/8 NPT end of the oil fitting wants to be pointing towards the rear of the car. The threaded oil fitting is in the top of the turbo, center fairly easy to see. Screw the banjo bolt--1/8 npt adapter fitting and two copper washers (one on either side of the fitting) and turn it down into the threaded oil fitting in the turbo. This is a 17mm socket and torque wrench combo, I torqued it to 30 foot lbs. That is probably close plus or minus a few lbs. It is somewhat difficult to tell what the proper torque for these bolts should be, trying to decipher from the booklet given. If anyone else has done a translation let me know.
NOTE:
At this point, I bent the hose over towards the drivers side, then it is in kind of a backward S shape and then over to the fitting. The picture in the instruction book shows it more or less going straight up to the fitting but you can't do that because of the way the top heat shield fits on. So I curved the hose out to the drivers side and then up to the fitting, and it works OK, with no sharp bends in it. In my opinion the hose was made too long so that is why it has to S around like it does. It is apparent that whomever designed this kit, never actually install one on an MR2. Bend the hose out and then up to the fitting, and screw it in place.
NOTE:
that I did not use any pipe putty or thread sealer on the threads on either end of the hose fittings and I have had no oil leaks, again this is up to you as to if you want to use any type of thread sealer, there are many on the market.
As for torque for the fitting, carefully snug it down, do not over torque this fitting as you can easily damage it.
Now you are ready to place the down pipe on the turbo, you will easily see three shorter SS bolts that will hold the down pipe onto the turbo housing. Using the gasket that comes with the kit marked in the booklet as #20 and the down pipe marked as #3 and get three bolts they are about an inch or so long and three lock washers position the down pipe and gasket and screw it down using the three bolts and lock washers. Again this is easy to do with the turbo in the car as there is plenty of room to work. I torqued these bolts down to about 30 ft. lbs. I would have liked to see these bolts a bit longer, and I think I will go over to my local ACE hardware store this weekend and get three longer bolts for this. You may want to do the same later.
After you have the down pipe bolted on then you can easily put the O2 sensor back on in the welded on fitting that is very obviously made for it. There are two bolts, two nuts, and two lock washers for this, again when all of the bolts are laid out it is obvious to tell which bolts go where, the booklet for this, is basically worthless as there is no specific numbering for these that would make it easy to tell which is which. For these two bolts given their size I torqued them down snug probably about 14 to 15 ft. lbs of torque will work. The chart that is in the booklet is difficult to tell what torque is required. I am judging this by other bolts on the car that are similar in size and thread pitch and overall length and the material that they are screwing into. Make sure that you remember to plug the connector for the 02 sensor back in.
Now you can crawl under the car and hook up the oil return hose. This is labeled #14 in the booklet, along with #10 and #11 and #24. For this where the bracket that holds the oil return pipe back away from the down pipe the bolt is not provided in the kit, I used the bolt that was screwed into the block that holds the stock oil return pipe down to the block. So position the part #11 and part #24 which is the brace bracket you will have to fiddle around with the position of the brace bracket piece to get it so that it fits right with no large gap between it and the hole it goes to in the down pipe. There is a slight bend in it and it will become obvious fairly quick as to which end goes where. You want to put it down first, so that the brace bracket #24 is touching down on the block, and then the #11 bracket that holds the oil return hose out of the way of the down pipe goes on top then of course the bolt holds both down to the block, and it screws into the hole where the stock return pipe had a bracket piece that came out from it and was held in place there.
NOTE:
what I did also at this point before I torqued down the bolt was to use another bolt to position the brace bracket to the hole in the down pipe. This will help you keep the brace bracket in position while you torque down the bolt. Also position the #11 bracket so that its open side points away from you this is obvious when you see how it holds the oil return hose up out of the way. As for the bolt that holds the bracket and brace piece down to the block, you can torque it to about 25 to 30 ft. lbs or so, but I just snugged it down good, again a specific torque on this is not really necessary so long as it is down good, but this bolt can easily hold 30 ft.lbs.
Now we are ready to finish the hook up of the oil return hose, there is the hose, two hose clamps (again very obvious which ones go on it) and the #10 piece which is an adapter piece that fits this new hose to the short curved stock hose that is connected to the oil pan. So slide on the two clamps, watching to position them so that the screw end is easy to reach, and push one end of the hose up onto the fitting on the turbo and then press the small end of the #10 adapter in the other end of the new hose and then the large end of the #10 adapter in to the short curved stock hose that is on the oil pan. Then position the hose clamps and tighten them down, I think it was a 5/16 socket could be wrong on that but check it before you put them on to be sure. Tighten down all four hose clamps, two on the short curved stock hose and two on the new oil return hose.
Now you will see how the oil return line needs to be positioned on the holding bracket, the kit also provides a heat reflecting wrap for this hose, you can choose to wrap the hose before you install it or after you install it, the choice is yours For now, I chose not to use the wrap as it appears that there is sufficient room for air flow around the hose, and also my IC fans keep a constant flow of air going in that direction so even when the car is standing still there would be sufficient air flow around the hose to keep the heat from either damaging the hose or boiling the oil inside it. I will check this theory out just to make sure :) I would however suggest that if you have a purely stock setup, then please use the reflective wrap on the hose.
Now, back top side, the kit provides two hose plugs for the coolant lines I chose not to go this route, but bought a 1 foot length of 3/8 hose from a local Baxters auto supply, and looped the coolant back. I think this is better than using plugs to plug up the line. The plugs that the kit provides are marked as #25 in the booklet, and of course their associated hose clamps. For those that have a stock setup there is also a new J pipe that is supplied marked #23 in the booklet, this is used to run the output from the stock BOV back into the intake. Of course for those that do not have stock then this is another part for the pile over in the corner of the garage. :)
There are also parts provided for the hook up of the stock #4 pipe (cast aluminum stock pipe that has the stock BOV on it) there are parts #12 and associated hose clamps marked 15--18 in the booklet that are used for this, and hose #13 which I assume is for the stock BOV along with the #27 and #28 these are shown on page 20 & 21 of the booklet. I am not going into a lot of detail on this as I do not have these stock setups on my MR2 and as I did not actually do this part, then I can not detail its install, but most of it is fairly obvious from either the pictures in the booklet or your specific knowledge of taking the stock parts apart and putting them back together.
There is now the issue of the stock heat shield, the one on the side where the oil filter is, and where the O2 sensor goes through it. On the side of the new down pipe there are three welded on nuts, that is an ugly attempt to try and make a place to allow the stock heat shield to mount. I tried mounting it and it just would not fit right. And even if it could have, the problem then would be that the end that goes around the side of the oil filter would stick out such that the oil filter could not be installed. So needless to say I could not use this feature. Perhaps others will have more luck with it.
That just about wraps up the install, excepting for some details that I am sure are specific to your MR2 and which would be meaningless for me to go into detail on my car because it is not like yours.
Impressions of the kit and install:
There are several points that I liked and did not like about the kit and the overall install. I will go into the dislikes first.
DISLIKES:
There is a problem with the adapter plate that couples the turbo to the stock exhaust manifold. First I did not like the fact that there were no reliefs put into the part for a socket to fit on the nuts. It appears at least to me that the overall structural integrity of the part would not be compromised from machining a socket relief in it. Also I did not like the overall port matching of the part. It appeared to me to be roughly cast and did not even match the gasket port. There may be some overall gain by port matching this adapter, but I have no data to back that up at this time. I did not like the three long bolts that were provided in the kit, or at least my kit. These bolts displayed a really odd characteristic in that under fairly light torque the nut seized up on to the threads of the bolt so hard that I literally had to twist the head of the bolt off, to get it off the down pipe. Now I could understand this if it were some type of locking mechanism but to lock up to the point of not being able to remove it is ridiculous, so I would strongly suggest not using them. As previously stated, I purchased some SAE 3/8 inch 2 inch long (or so) SS bolts and their associated nuts and lock washers, these are 3/8 fine thread (24 TPI). I also did not like the fact that the side stock heat shield, the one that fits over the O2 sensor, the welded on nuts on the side of the down pipe were poorly done and the stock heat shield did not even come close to fitting in place. So what I had to do was form a tube of the heat reflecting material using some aluminum tape I had and make a wrap for the oil filter to protect it from the IR heat from the turbo and the down pipe. My IC fans will handle the rest. There are various other fitment type issue such as the SS oil feed line being too long also the three long SS bolts that the nuts seized up on them and I had to twist the heads completely off to get the bolt out. I don't think that the three bolts used to hold the down pipe in place were long enough. And the down pipe does not fit exactly like stock either, it is positioned pointing up slightly enough so that my custom pipe that Lino made me now hits the oil pan. So I will have to ream out the three holes that hold the down pipe to the turbos on the down pipe, so that the down pipe can be positioned so that the custom pipe will not hit the oil pan.
LIKES:
I do like the way the turbo spools up, it is much quicker that I thought it would be. I also like the power it provides, and it does not fade either, even on long sustained WOT runs. I do not have the problem with spiking that others have reported with this kit, not sure if that is something to do with their exhaust system or what. That about wraps it up, if you see anything missing, let me know and I will add it. As always let me know if you have any questions.