Turbo Installation and Porting This is the largest project I have ever undertaken with my car. I have to tell you, once I removed everything necessary to do this job, I was a bit overwhelmed. Looking at the big pile of bolts, and all of the other pieces I had taken off.. I did not think I would ever get it put back together again. But first, a word about tools. If there is one thing I have learned time and time again while working on my car, it is that if you do not have the right tools for the job DON'T do the job. Sure, I screwed the cap of my fuel pump back on with a large screwdriver and a rubber mallet instead of buying the "special tool" from the dealership. But I also didnt get it seated right the first time, and dumped a gallon of gas onto the floor of my garage. Had I ordered the tool in advance and had it ready, things would have went smoothly. That being said, there are a few things you REALLY need to have, to get this job done properly. A LARGE breaker bar. Atleast 18" - Sears, 30$ (for Porting) A Die Grinder. Not a dremel. - 100$ at Post Tools Carbide Burrs for grinding. 1 Cylinder style, 1 thin tipped cone. - 45$ at post tools. 1 tube/spray can of Anti-Sieze. Atleast 2000F, 1600F will not work. - 5$ at autoparts store. 1 can PB Blaster (Liquid Wrench will work, but not as well) - available at Pep Boys. For good measure, I also picked up an electric Impact Wrench. This really helped getting bolts off. I would recommend it, although you could get by with just the breaker bar. I also picked up a 3 foot piece of galvanized 1" piping. Slip this over the end of your breaker bar, and suddenly you have enough torque to remove ANYTHING. With that out of the way.. I am not going to go into detail about how to do the installation, or the porting, because Tom Stangl has written VFAQ's for all of them. Here they are: Turbo Install using the RRE Hacker/Tweaker kit. Turbo Porting. Exhaust Manifold Porting. o2 Sensor Housing Porting. As for my installation experience.. Day 1 was a lot of removing parts, to get to the Manifold / Turbo / o2 housing. I ended up going out to buy the impact wrench, so I could get the turbo bolts out and drop the turbo. I still couldnt get the manifold off, though. I finished porting the o2 housing just before midnight. I have to tell you, porting is MESSY. Little chips of metal get everywhere. Wear ratty clothes, and have as little exposed flesh as possible. The insides of my arms are all scratched up from being pelted by tiny pieces of sharp metal. Most of the frustration came on day 2, when we were putting everything back together. Porting the exhaust manifold took forever. There is a HUGE lip inside of the exit. Took about 2 hours to port it out to match the 7cm gasket. Porting the exhaust side of the turbo was another hour easy. I had a little trouble with RRE's stainless steel oil supply line. I did not realize that the connectors on each end of the hose unscrew. This is definitely important to know! The end that screws into the oil filter assembly needs to be removed first. Make sure you screw the line back onto the plug tightly, too. Also, note that the oil line needs to be bolted to the turbo BEFORE you bolt it back in place. You can not get to it after that. We had to drop the turbo back down to bolt it into place. Since Alex was holding up the turbo while I bolted the line down, I was not able to put a lot of torque into it. Once we had everything put back together and turned on the car, oil started pouring from the line. We did not torque it enough. ARGH! I am going to try and find a small 19mm wrench, and see if I can torque it down without removing the turbo from the car again. If I have to drop the turbo, I will have to: Remove the heat shields Remove the j-pipe Remove the down pipe Remove the turbo inlet pipe Drain all the oil and coolant Remove the oil and water lines Then unbolt the turbo from the manifold Needless to say, I want to avoid this if possible. I am going to try it tonight.. let's hope I can get to that bolt! *UPDATE* - 8/15/00 As it turns out, the oil supply line was bolted plenty tight to the turbo. The problem was with the hoop fitting. The stainless steel oil supply line that RRE sends you has removable ends on it. The plug that goes into the oil filter assembly, and the hoop fitting that goes onto the turbo are screwed into the line. I did not tighten the hoop fitting. So, the oil was leaking from the fitting, and not from the bolt itself. To get to that bolt, I did not have to do all of the above. Here is a list of what I had to do: Remove the heat shields (I had actually never put them back on) Unbolt the J-Pipe from the Turbo (you do not have to remove it completley) Unbolt the Downpipe from the rubber hangar under the car Remove the 4 Turbo bolts That is it! Took about 30 minutes total. It does seem, however, that I have a second oil leak. In the VFAQ, it tells you NOT to remove the oil drain pipe from the car. The RRE kit only comes with ONE gasket for the oil drain pipe. If you remove it from the turbo AND from the oil pan, you need to replate BOTH gaskets. So, I tried to piece together one of the old gaskets and it obviously did not work. I have ordered another gasket, for a whopping $1.80. That will get installed tonight, and we will hopefully be done. Stay tuned!