Well this was an odd one! A friend of mine recently had a lot of work done on his 124 Abarth, to include a new stuffed turbo. Everything seemed fine for a couple days, but then the car started to, in his words, “sound like an old airplane” and wasn’t making any boost. He pulled back the turbo blanket and found this just sitting on top of the manifold.

One of the studs had backed out of the turbo! My buddy called the installer and he suggested a bolt be run from the top all the way through the turbo and manifold, securing it with a nut on the bottom. This is where my friend enlisted me for help.

Now this sounded like a pretty straightforward fix. We would need to remove the turbo blanket, intake hose, and wastegate actuator, and then it would be easy to drop the bolt down in there. Well once we peeled back the turbo blanket, we discovered that not just one stud fell out, but three! Additionally the gasket had become severely misaligned.

To gain more room to work, we had to remove the strut tower brace, the coolant reservoir, and the intercooler pipe. Once I could get my hand down in there, I tried to push the gasket back into alignment. No go! That gasket was wedged in there tight, presumably still clamped down with the one remaining stud. We needed to loosen that stud…

In the picture below you can see the hole for the original stud my buddy found on the left, and the one remaining stud on the right. As you can see there’s no way to get any wrench or socket on it. It’s completely surrounded!

Crows foot wrench to the rescue! If you’ve never used one of these, it’s basically the head of an open wrench that you can put on a ratchet. They are a crutch at best; haha! Due to the limited space, I was only able to turn the nut on the stud about 10°, then take the wrench off the nut, and reposition the wrench and ratchet. All by feel since there was no way to see the nut. Needless to say this took a while.

After loosening the last remaining stud, the gasket still wouldn’t budge. We tried jiggling the turbo, but it wasn’t going anywhere. I popped the vband clamp off the downpipe hoping that would give us enough play to wiggle the turbo, but it was no help. So I had to free up the downpipe itself. We got the car jacked up and unbolted the splashpan. From there I was able to disconnect the crosspipe from the downpipe, and loosen the downpipe’s brackets.

Finally we were able to wiggle the turbo and push the gasket back into place. With the gasket where it needed to be, I ran the replacement bolt for the first stud down from the top just as easily as planned, but now we needed to get a nut on it. There was no way I could get my hand in there to thread the nut on. I could only just barely touch the bottom of the bolt with the tip of one finger. Solution? Tape the nut and washer to the finger! I backed the bolt out until it was just barely poking through the bottom. Then I was able to hold the nut underneath the bolt, and simultaneously thread the bolt through the turbo and onto the nut. After the nut was threaded on, I was then able to tighten it with a standard wrench. Again only about 10° at a time… This was taking forever.

With the engine side of the turbo taken care of, we now needed to replace the two other missing studs. If you refer back to the picture above where the gasket is misaligned, you can see the turbine housing hangs over the top of the stud holes. This prevented me from easily running a bolt from the top like the last one. Additionally, there was very little room from the bottom due to the manifold itself. Fortunately we found some bolts at the local hardware store that were just barely short enough to fit from the bottom, yet still long enough to fully engage the turbo.

This does not mean the task was simple. Due to the lack of space, I could only get one finger tip from each hand on the bolts to guide them into their holes. I had to carefully rotate the bolt with just the very tips of my left and right index finger, only a few degrees at a time. One proved to be particularly tricky as it kept wanting to cross thread. It took five attempts of getting it started and then backing it out before it threaded correctly. I was able to get a wrench on the bolts to tighten, but there was even less room on this side of the turbo. I was only able to turn the wrench about 7° at a time.

The “simple task” was finally complete. We reconnected the downpipe, tightened back down the vband, replaced the intercooler and intake hoses, replaced the strut tower bar, and the coolant reservoir. After buttoning everything back up, we eagerly fired it up… and there were no exhaust leaks! Huzzah! It only took a short 8 hours.

DanBook

founder

Dan is a DIY zealot and autodidact. Real science, pseudoprofessional.