Today I tried to make more progress on removing the studs from the turbine housing of the TTE550 turbochargers that I received yesterday.  I picked up a stud removal tool to help with my extraction attempts of the stuck stud.

I also had left penetrating oil on the studs for the past 24 hours.  I started off with trying to loosen the studs on the second turbo as I let the corner of the turbine housing with the pesky stud be blasted by a heat gun for several minutes.

To my pleasant surprise I was able to remove the studs from the second turbo with my fingers.  Four down, four to go.

I went back to the first turbo and attached the stud removal tool.  With the help of a breaker bar the stud slowly began to loosen.  With the pesky stud out I had hopes that the other three would be easier, but that was not to be.  I repeated the heating process on the second stud, and again with a great deal of force I was able to slowly extract the stud.  Then my luck ran out.

I heated the third corner and attached the stud removal tool.  Part way through my initial pull the stud gave out and sheared off about halfway down the stud.  There was still enough thread left to get a good bite on the stud with the removal tool, so I attached it again and tried some more.  Again the stud sheared, this time inside the turbine housing.  Lovely.

The last one was a repeat of the third, the stud sheared halfway down and I threw in the towel at that point not wishing to have two studs broken off inside the turbine housing.

WTF is going on here.  My best guess is that these studs were never taken out at TTE.  The turbine housings were purchased from TTE as they were known to be good used units with no cracks in them.  I was having a set of K04’s upgraded and the original turbine housings were deemed unacceptable for use in the upgrade.   Apparently they never tried taking the studs out of these used housings before working on the housing and sending the completed product to me.

Here’s what I’ve got now:

I was hoping to avoid taking the turbo to a machine shop, but drilling out the studs is not something I’ve got the tools for, so it looks like I’ll be researching a place to get me out of this jam.