[Jmpont72]

I am restoring a 80 pacecar and my turbo is whipped, has anyone rebuilt theirs? Are there kits available? Does anyone have a good turbo for sale?

[bankbook]

look at
301 garage.

[3 Chiefs]

While I have never rebuilt a 301 turbo, I do rebuild diesel engines for a living. Every system including the turbo gets overhauled. I have also rebuilt a few Chrysler turbos and I bought those kits from JC Whitney of all places. The cost through them was about 100 bucks. A turbo is a very simple piece of equipment. If you have mechanical skill, this is within your ability.
If you find a kit and do this yourself, just take your time and since this may be your first one, lay the parts out in the order that you remove them. This makes you feel more confident that you are going back together with the right parts in the right order.
I don't have this problem on the Cummins and Detroit Diesels that I rebuild but I did on the Chrysler's. Be sure to thoroughly clean the oil return passage out. The Chrysler's I have found get full of carbon. When this happens the return is restricted and the oil gets drawn into the compressor side or the turbine side and the vehicle smokes bad.
Do you know who the manufacturer of your 301 turbo was?

Paul

['ol Pinion head]

Been quite a few years, but have rebuilt half a dozen turbo chargers off '80 & 81 Turbo T/A's. To rebuild, you will end up buying a rebuilt center section (CHRA) & swapping it in place of current center housing. The labor to pull & replace the entire turbo charger/plenum assembly takes a while. I always pulled the throttle cable, cruise & detent lines, first, then removed the carb, but I know of guys in shops that wrestled with & pulled the whole bulky thing. I wouldn't attempt it that way, just too easy to booger things up.

The number one thing I'd advise anyone they HAVE to do before disassembly, is take pictures of the routing all the vacuum hoses & lines. The '80 Service Pontiac supplement is horrible as far as pics go & the schematic will be tough to read for most shadetree mechanics. Often quite a few of the boost referenced hoses may have swelled on the ends & there will be vacuum leaks. The hoses coming off the PEVR are part of a small vac harness & they are bad about that. The hose providing coolant to the plenum is another one that will probably have to be replaced, if it never has been. Am sure that the PEVR harness is disco'ed, so you may have to rebuild the harness.

When reassembling the CHRA to the housings, the small bolts are metric (14mm?) & torquing them to spec, I ended up buying some short offset crowfeet wrenches that I could attach to my torque wrench, then had to measure & do the math so could torque could properly. Many of the bolts holding everything together are special. In the 90's in Pick-N-Pulls when I stumbled across draw through 231 Turbo Buick V6's or rained in or engine fire Turbo 301's I used to rob numerous bolts off the turbo compressor outlets, turbo to intake, etc, many are the same. Hope this helps.

['ol Pinion head]

Garrett-AI Research was original supplier of the turbochargers. agree with you 3CHIEFS on the oil coking, that was big issue on many turbo 301 cars with average idiot owner that seldom changed the oil & drove the draw through GM turbo cars hard. Many also turned the the ignition off immediately upon coming in from driving them hard. I always changed the oil religiously on my modified Turbo 301 & gave the car a while to idle on the driveway after I came in from driving it hard. Seemed to work well that way.

[Jmpont72]

I have rebuilt many engines and a few turbos so its no big deal to do it but its finding the kit that im having trouble with

[Ben]

G-Pop Shop does great work on rebuilding them