The honeymoon is over with the Paragon oil lines.  The turbo wastegate lines have lost my affections as well.  I’d mentioned previously that the lines were something of a challenge to get installed.  I found during the engine reinstall phase that the way they stick out on the passenger side makes accounting for them during installation an important factor to consider.  Otherwise the oil line can get hung up on the frame and cause problems on the install.

I decided previously to abandon the wastegate actuator lines.  Those lines along with the signal line and oil lines was just too much stuff to cram into the small channel leading down to the turbocharger.  Sure, it could probably have been done, and if I was only doing this once I may have sucked it up and spent a long time trying to get everything to fit.  But I’m not just doing this once and I don’t want to be bothered with needing to wrestle with these oversized lines each engine pull.  So I jettisoned the one set of lines to the wastegate canisters.  This go round I’m pulling off the signal line hoses.  Not due to fitment but because I was getting some readings from the compressor housing that I was not expecting and I want to cross check the results with those obtained with the stock signal lines.

But onto my current issue with the oil lines.  They’re big and not flexible.  Today I put everything on the turbo’s and bolted up the downpipes, torqued all the bolts down and then went to reinstall the EGT sensors:

F*********************k!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The thought of undoing the last hour plus of work just to install the EGT sensor was a most unpleasant thought.  Then button it all back up again, I really didn’t feel I needed the extra practice attaching the lines to the turbocharger at this stage.

That oil line does not get moved easily, that’s the one that sits beneath the coolant supply line.

I decided (hoped) that if I turned the turbocharger slightly counter-clockwise there’d be enough space created to allow me to thread the EGT sensor bolt into place.  Of course this would mean that the sensor wasn’t coming out without pulling the motor, but since I have plans to do that in a few weeks or months that should not be a problem.

I had to unbolt the downpipes, loosen the bolts holding the turbo to the exhaust manifold, and loosen the inlet pipe, but it worked.  Enough space was made to get the bolt into place, thank goodness, the other option of taking the coolant line off would have been a couple of hours of work, versus about 20 minutes.

Still, I’m getting to the point that the robust oil lines just aren’t impressing me.  I used the smaller Induktion oil lines for years and never had any problems with them, I’m starting to think swapping back might be a good thing to do.

This afternoon I swapped the passenger side exhaust manifold and turbocharger.

I also received a pair of the Aquamist 0.7 mm water-methanol nozzles with check valves.  These will be used in place of the 1 mm nozzles that I had on with the K03’s as the pump duty cycle needed to be set on the low side in order to keep the volume of water being injected at an appropriate level.

By using the 0.7 mm nozzles I’m hoping to run the system at a higher pressure with the K04’s while still keeping the volume of fluid low enough to just get the job done.