Hey all, I just wanted to take the opportunity to show you one of the GT30 Turbo’s I have been given to test on one of my B18C engine builds from MaXpeedingRods. *Warning* This is quite detailed and picture heavy so if you like that kinda stuff please keep reading.

As some of you may know, there are some opportunities available to review some of their products and as I am doing a budget performance engine rebuild on my B18C2 DC2 Integra, I contacted them to see if they would like me to review one of their Turbo’s, to which they agreed and supplied me with one of their GT30 turbochargers.

As some of you would also know about these Turbo's, the Oil feed/Drain + Coolant water line setup on this GT style Turbocharger is critical, and as I was curious to know what they had on offer to use with their product I requested an Oil feed line kit, which they supplied me with.

Okay so..what do you actually get when you order one of these? What features do they have? And what is this Turbo actually? how should it be configured when installed?

Hopefully this will answer some questions floating around about how good/bad the quality of these turbo’s actually are and how to install them the correct way as there are no instructions with these turbochargers provided. Professional installation or knowledge of how to install this turbo is required or any problems you encounter will not be warranted by the manufacturer!. This turbo actually does have a 2 year warranty! Which I thought was pretty good.

Alrighty. So firstly, the turbo + Oil line kit arrived very quickly and to be honest I’m not sure if they expedited it to me seeing as I am taking part in their review/sponsorship deal, But here’s how they arrived.



I went ahead and unwrapped the line kit as you can see, this came in a giant yellow mail bag, everything was undamaged but the warranty card was a little squished which I didn’t worry about. The Turbo also came with its own separate warranty card which I’ll show you in the next few pics.




Okay, so here we can see it removed from the box, it was wrapped quite well. It comes sitting on the exhaust housing as pictured, which is rested on top of a thick wrapped foam pad, and is also encased in a plastic bag with compressor caps for the wheel and housing inlet. The base of the turbo exhaust housing is wrapped in wax paper to help prevent corrosion, a feature that most other turbo’s usually come with when boxed. Notice that it also comes with a thick stainless Turbo flange gasket which I really liked as it is a quality unit, (I will include pics of it installed on the manifold at the end) and also some oil feed/drain gaskets and a banjo bolt which I assume is for one of feed or return ports.



Plastic off..what do we have here?


As you can see, for a budget journal bearing GT style turbo it is actually fairly good quality. Here's a couple of extra pics i took of it in natural light and one with a flash to show you what the housing looks like under bright lighting to give you an idea of the surface detail.




Not bad..Is it perfect? Well no. But my version is only a free evaluation version, yours will be a new boxed version..but still as I’ve already said it’s quite an impressive looking unit for what you actually pay for. Moving on, what does the compressing wheel and housing look like up close? In this next pic below you can see it’s quite good. What you’re looking at is a GT3076R journal bearing compressor housing. It’s definitely not a Garret, but it’s quite a clean version of the design. The housing is free from defects, It has a location on the inlet for a vacuum port if you wish to drill and install one, and the wheel itself appears to be of a good standard and rotates freely without touching the housing or rotating out of balance. (we will be installing and dynoing this turbo on the engine in a further follow-up)



Next, on to the exhaust housing and turbine wheel we can see the housing finish itself looks great. The flange has a few surface marks here and there but the camera images speak for themselves. The wheel if you look closely also has a tiny scratch on one of the impeller blades but the wheel moves freely, does not touch the housing and runs true as it should, so I am not concerned. I did note this to MaXpeedingRods just as an observation. (There does appear to be some other marks on the outside edges of the impeller blades but ignore this as its just shadowing off the camera flash)



As you can see above, this turbo uses the older 4 bolt turbine housing design. A V-band option would have been great, but again you get what you pay for and if you want that option you can always cut and weld that onto the housing. For the purposes of the final review I will not be modifying the turbo at all, It will be run exactly as it came out of the box.

Here we have a shot of the hot side and flange, which is a T3 flange. You can see that again the quality of the machining is not bad. The flange surface is evenly machined and did fit up well to the exhaust manifold when mated with the supplied gasket. You can also see the turbo drain port which is machined nicely. (In these pics the turbo has not been clocked or modified as yet it’s as you see it right out of the box)



In this next shot we have a close-up of the turbo showing the oil Feed port and one of the water ports of which there are 2 (one on each side), These are an important part of the GT style turbo design which we will touch on later. Notice that the turbo housing bolts are marked for disassembly/reassembly order. This turbo is also able to be clocked on both the Compressor and Turbine side for full adjustment on any type of manifold and Oil feed + return/water line setup you wish to use which is a nice feature for a budget turbo.



Before continuing on to the end I want to show some close-ups of the Oil line kit. The kit shown here is “Universal for T3 turbo” so in saying this I knew that not everything contained in this kit will be of use in this particular install, but I hoped that I would be able to use some of its contents and I also was curious to see the quality of the fittings and hoses supplied. To be honest I have to say that the quality is good and I would be happy to use them. Unfortunately the oil feed line will not work for me in this application because I am using this turbo on a bottom mount ramhorn style manifold (which we will see at the conclusion of this review) the return line however is a 550mm -10AN line which we will cut to size and use with the fittings supplied. (Some modification may be required on final install we will show this at a later date) we also did use the Allen nuts pictured to secure the oil feed line port adapter and they fit the application as intended but we may not use this in the final install due to using a different style of oil feed line adapter. It would work fine with a log or top mount style manifold install.





Details of what exactly is included in the kit are listed on the link I posted above at the beginning of the review. The feed line is a 1000mm -4AN line and the return is a 500mm -10AN. Note: The T3 flange gasket pictured is supplied with the turbo and does not come with the line kit.

Here are some frontal shots of the Turbo + line kit for your viewing pleasure:




Final thoughts..Okay so, in this review I have shown you the products, how they come from the manufacturer and what is included. I also want to give my thoughts on what this turbo is and some advice for installation.

In my opinion this is a decent budget version of a journal Bearing Garret GT3037-3076R turbo. It comes marked on the box as a GT3037 but in reality this turbo is more of a hybrid and uses the exducer/inducer sized turbine wheel of the GT3037 with a 0.82 A/R turbine housing and the bigger Compressor side of the GT3076R.

MaXpeedingRods estimates that with the right size engine that it could be capable of up to 500hp, and in my opinion for a street driven car it is not a bad option for those that want performance with street drivable spool times below 4k rpm. When I originally looked at reviewing these turbo’s I almost went for the bigger GT35 with its anti-surge housing before remembering bigger is not always better on a smaller mildly modified 1.8L street driven engine.

One thing I’d like to touch on is installation of this turbo design, it is a GT style turbo and the original designer (Garret) has written installation instructions specific to this turbo, including the clocking position for the proper installation of the OIL + WATER lines. The Water lines MUST be used in the installation of this turbo as they are a critical part of its design in helping to cool the turbo housing and bearing unit. Here is a link that will explain what I am talking about below

https://www.garrettmotion.com/racing...m-optimization

(scroll down to find housing orientation settings and explanations about journal bearing Feed/return + Water Line line setup)

And finally, here is a shot of my turbo installed onto my AC/PS friendly Ramhorn Exhaust manifold, notice the clearance between the header pipe and Oil feed port, this is why we won’t be using the feed line supplied, as it is not designed to work in this application with this manifold setup.


Thanks again to MaXpeedingRods for their support on my project build, and stay tuned for the second part of my review which will show the turbo installed and running on the dyno!



Cheers

-Aido