Thanks for your technical support and suggestions….
After further examining thing, I am suspecting the culprit might be the turbo….
The 1.8T’s single turbo sits on the lower passenger side, and that’s roughly where I’ve been seeing an occasional droplets of coolant on the ground. (I checked the radiator and hoses, and those were fine. The water pump is also fine (it’s in the middle/center position, so that’s not the source of the leak…
I suspect that somehow coolant is leaking within the turbo into the xhaust outlet, which would explain the white smoke coming out of the tailpipe.
Thoughts? Here’s a rough picture of how things are (not my car)
Unfortunately, the catalytic converter is right after the turbo, and with a coolant leak, that probably means my cat is dead too. Interestingly, I’m not seeing any fault codes for from my O2 sensors, and from the ECU scan, everything looks ok. So it’s just weird.
Man, this is going to be a bitch and half to fix.
Parts cost aside is the least of my concern.. Labor is up the ying yang, even if it’s my own labor…
I think most of the front will need to come off again…. And dealing with bolts on the cat and turbo after they’ve been heated and cooled for 16 years is not going to be fun…
I really don’t want to revisit this again:
[img_assist|nid=25707|title=timing belt hell|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=600 | height=500]
On the plus side. Maybe this is the solution to my track car. Maybe the cat has to come off, and maybe the turbo is shot. Maybe would be a good time to put in a larger turbo, take the cat off completely and just run a straight pipe, and just PNO the car and leave it for track duty…. heh heh… I do need to swap the tranny too, but I’m guessing those should be pretty easy to find in the junkyard.
