I was in the process of mocking up the turbo on a dead engine, trying to figure out my oil lines, etc, then I went to cleaning everything up..
One thing led to another, which led to the whole works being apart on my bench ;)
What I noticed was there seems to be a distinct lack of lube on the reduction gear bushings in the actuator.. they seem to have some sort of nylon? bushing.. they're still good but I could see signs of them getting eaten up.. they're a reddish color and there were some red flakes on the housing.
It is driven by a stepper motor, and should the board ever fry on me, I think I'll scrap it and drive the stepper motor directly... I wasn't able to remove the board, I'm going out on a limb here but I think the solder joints to the stepper motor are holding it back, and I wasn't going to pry on anything.. would have loved to take a look at what components are on the backside of it. I had originally thought that it detected the home position by bottoming out, but on one of the reduction gear wheels there's a magnet embedded in it, and a chip on the board that must be a magnetic sensor.
Really cool to see the how it works, especially the fine machine work on the vanes. I had seen a Ford VGT turbo apart, and they're very different.. they change the angle of the vanes, while this really changes the nozzle width... I guess each style has it's benefits, but I can say this has a whole lot less moving parts... I haven't put it back together yet, so I'll try and get some pics and post them up
I've had it all the way down to the board being removed. When I got my VGT UPS helped me out by dropping my package atleast 3 times. The wires to the controller were broken right at the exit.
So I had to take the whole thing apart, no way I was going to leave a solder joint near the exhaust housing of a turbo. So yes, you have to de-solder the motor, to get the board completely out. However my reduction gears certainly had lube. It appeared to be a white lithium type of grease, certainly not your average wheel bearing grease.
Ya the holset design has a TON less moving parts. Really just a gigantic piston lol. The outer ring that the nozzle fits into, that ring actually spins and at the maximum size of the turbo / minimum protrusion the fins still fit into the vane holes, so make sure you line it up with the housing extended to make it easier, then just turn it into place.
Did you index the motor? I found it doesn't index at the same place every time.. it rotates about 1/3rd of a turn, and for as much as I can tell ignores that magnet... I put it together randomly, then test fired it, it sucks back, then moves a little forward.. as a test I took it apart and indexed it to a different location, and it does exactly the same thing... don't know what to make of that.
The part that seemed to be missing lube was the bushings.. I have some silicone dielectric grease that's slippery darned stuff and doesn't come off even with solvents.. I put some of that on it.. meanwhile it doesn't hurt electronics any.
I took notice of that ring.. does that come out at all or is it somehow staked into place?
I also couldn't figure out what that big flat bulge on the hot side housing could possibly be for.
I guess the UPS guy took it literally when you said "Drop it off at my door"
Ya I should take pictures of the box it came in and upload, its got like 7 holes in it, really bad ones. They won't help me with the UPS insurance cause I'm not the shipper, and the shipper basically refuses to help me out, its been half a year without resolution.
To index the motor you just change the send command where the 0x01 to 0x02, and it'll index and power off, reset your command and de-power and re-power the turbo you're good to go.
I had mine off, I need to take it apart and ensure I have it indexed right.
I have full range on the turbo without issues so I must have it close haha, but still.
Again you don't have to index it.
byte data[] = { lo_byte, hi_byte, 0x01, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF }; // data message with an added counter
// data[2] = 0x02 for recalibrating gearbox
swap 0x01 for 0x02 and it'll self calibrate
I will do that and see what happens. I am wondering if it will change what I am used to as far as my boostmap haha.
Here is from holset
(http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab360/me78569/Capture_zps7pktjslc.png) (http://s879.photobucket.com/user/me78569/media/Capture_zps7pktjslc.png.html)
attached is the full pdf
Some more stuff attached
Good info.. some slight differences in our design, but not by much, thanks!