Category Archives: The Turbo Engineers

Posts with a significant portion of the discussion involving The Turbo Engineers products

TTE550 Day 2

January 13, 2016 Jeffrey Jones

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:

Picture of TTE550 Turbine Stud Carnage — TTE550 Turbine Stud Carnage

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.

Misc., The Turbo Engineers, Turbo Selection

TTE550 First Look

January 12, 2016 Jeffrey Jones

A set of TTE550’s has arrived for evaluation. The turbochargers came well packed and even included a balance sheet for each turbo, a nice addition for turbo’s that have been rebuilt to upgrade the BorgWarner K04’s to a hybrid using a variant on the RS6 center.

pair of tte 550 turbochargers — TTE550 RS4 K04 Hybrid Turbochargers

Looking them over it dawned on me that the ring that goes around the wastegate canister increases the effective diameter of the canister, and I have encountered problems fitting the TiAL turbo inlets past the BW K04 wastegate canisters. This could lead to future headaches when I start installing these turbo’s. The ring can be loosened and rotated, hopefully that will be enough to avoid problems fitting them alongside the inlets

I next turned my attention to giving the TTE550 a turn on the flow bench, something I have done with the BorgWarner K03 and K04 products in the past. First though I’d have to remove the turbine housing studs so I could fit the turbine housing flush to the flow bench.

I’ll just twist this first stud out, or maybe not. Vice grips, nope. Penetrant oil & heat, nope. F*******ck. Not coming out. Looks like I’ll be making a trip to a machine shop to have the studs removed.

Until that takes place I won’t be making any progress with further evaluating these TTE550 turbocharger’s.

To be continued…

The Turbo Engineers, Turbo Selection

TTE 550 vs TTE 600

November 9, 2015 Jeffrey Jones

The TTE 600 turbocharger has not been one that I’m interested in obtaining due to the RS6 turbine housing that it uses necessitating a different downpipe or flange. Still, I was curious how it would compare with the TTE 550 model and when I came across a set of dyno sheets from MRC Tuning showing one RS4 with the TTE 550’s and another with the TTE 600’s I decided to match them up.

A quick scan of the product descriptions shows that the TTE 600 is an RS6 K04 based turbo with a larger compressor wheel and some refinements made to the turbine wheel utilizing the RS6 turbine housing.

The TTE 550 is one of the candidates I’m considering and uses the same internals as the 600, (so far as I can tell), but packages them in the RS4 K04 housing, so the smaller K04 turbine housing.

It would appear the the main difference is the turbine housing, RS6 vs RS4.

Results:

I pulled some data from the dyno charts and after converting them to post-drivetrain loss at the wheels HP and Ft-Lb units I plotted them out.

Here’s how they compare:

The results are generally what one would expect to see given the physical differences in the turbochargers. The smaller 550 generates torque more quickly and the larger 600 is able to develop additional power at upper engine speeds.

Of interest to me is just how much greater the torque produced by the 550 is below 4000 rpm. At 3000 rpm the 550 car is making 100 ft-lbs more torque, growing to about 160 ft-lbs more by 3500 rpm.

I decided to take a look at the ‘area under the curve’, the term describing the overall torque being produced across the engine speed spectrum. Using a trapezoidal numerical integration at 500 rpm intervals the ‘area under the curve’ was remarkably close for these two turbochargers. The TTE 550 edges out the 600 by about 3%.

Conclusion:

The results shown here have reinforced my belief that the TTE 550 is probably the best product from the TTE lineup to achieve the goals I have for my S4.

My Audi S4