Refurbish or Replace a turbo?

[LucianB]

Hi community,
I am seeking some professional advice:
Recently i have found my g300 Prof not giving as much power on the turbo as it should. Merc Constantiaberg confirmed something inside has slightly damaged the blades. The advice they gave is either get it refurbished from another workshop or replace the turbo at Merc. Not sure if its a good idea to get it redone from another source. Has anyone experienced this done successfully? The other question is, what could possible be the cause? As merc does not open the units so they cant tell me what it is, and im worried whatever it may be could cause damage to the engine overall.
any advice would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance!
Lucian

 

[Andrew]

I am not the authority. My own experience has been that if the turbo is a Garrett then there are repair specialists for them.
But i have a question and it involves asking how you know that the power is down and if you are convinced, how do you know its the turbo and not for example a tank or two of paraffin diluted diesel?

Some years ago i had a 290 turbo and the turbo vanes were a little ragged from water droplets i was told - it spins at monster speeds and i think water droplets chew the vanes. I had the turbo overhauled and it made b-all difference to the performance - confirmed by the boost pressure guage i had fitted. A year or two later i looked in there and the vanes were ragged again. I left it like that and did not even tell Anthony about it when he bought it from me!

I think tiny water droplets get past the air filter and cause this without - imo - affecting it noticeably.

I think the risk of catastrophic failure is quite low.

 

[Alan]

I think there is a thread about that somewhere here on the forum. Use the search function. It was also on a Prof and iirc the turbo was replaced with a new AMT unit at a fraction of the cost. Was about end of 2021 beginning of 2022.

 

[Riaan Harman]

How many km on your prof?

 

[JJVDMZN]

Have it fixed, the agents price is so high that you can refurbish your turbo 4 times.

J.J.

 

[LucianB]

I am not the authority. My own experience has been that if the turbo is a Garrett then there are repair specialists for them.
But i have a question and it involves asking how you know that the power is down and if you are convinced, how do you know its the turbo and not for example a tank or two of paraffin diluted diesel?

Some years ago i had a 290 turbo and the turbo vanes were a little ragged from water droplets i was told - it spins at monster speeds and i think water droplets chew the vanes. I had the turbo overhauled and it made b-all difference to the performance - confirmed by the boost pressure guage i had fitted. A year or two later i looked in there and the vanes were ragged again. I left it like that and did not even tell Anthony about it when he bought it from me!

I think tiny water droplets get past the air filter and cause this without - imo - affecting it noticeably.

I think the risk of catastrophic failure is quite low.

Thank you for the advice!

 

[LucianB]

How many km on your prof?

I have about 130km on the clock. Thankfully I managed to get to the problem, which Doug with all his experience picked up in under 2 min! It was the tube leading to the engine which has a crack in it. Merc wanted to replace the turbo altogether ‍

 

[Bloudraad]

I bought a turbo from Goldwagon for R20000. Installation was another R4000. That is After I had the original refurbished twice and it failed twice. The Goldwagon Turbo still runs perfectly. The refurbishment was R16000, so did not save much. That included labour cost though.