WOW ... You are much more of a craftsman than I am. I am making my air ducts with drainpipe PVC, easy to modify while I work through the problems. If you have some left over duct stuff, I might be interested. My current joints are Fernco plumbing fittings. They expand up like a balloon when the pressure goes up.

I am interested in how and where you relocated located the oil cooler. I almost moved mine so that I could move the radiator over a couple of inches. It would have made the plumbing for the by-pass valve and the radiator much easier. It looked like moving the bottom radiator pads would be a pain so I just worked everything in. It could also free up a nice space for an intercooler.

When you had the throttle body off, did you happen to look at it to see if anything could be binding? I am still stumped by my symptoms.

My current approach is to install a low-pressure blow off valve to limit the boost pressure. The guys at turbo repair are super HONEST. They are hesitant about selling me the by-pass valve that they stock because they were not sure that it would do what I needed done. They wanted to contact the manufacturer first. In the mean time, I have a cheap plastic Bosch blow off valve that I have saw up so that I could make it "low pressure adjustable". I stuck it onto the PVC with JB Weld and will test it this weekend.

How hard is it to remove the throttle body? It looks like a frustrating, most of a day project.

Post some pictures of this project on your web site.

Wish that you lived closer to Virginia Beach.

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Jim Villers
190SL, 230SL 5-speed, 95 E320 Wagon, 01 E320 Wagon, MGB, Boxster 'S', 190SL "Barn Find"