A Cautionary Tale

As I sit here wearing my fingers to the bone preparing the newsletter my Tickford is once again sat in a local garage while the Turbo comes out for its third rebuild in fifteen months. Luckily for me rebuilds number two and three are under warranty. The sympton of the sickness was smoke billowing out from the joint between the bearing and Exhaust turbine housing as oil had obviously found its way past the seals. Oddly there are no emissions from the exhaust tail pipe. The turbo builders are this time going to install a double seal arrangement in place of the previous ceramic seals. However here comes the cautionery part, when they enquired what oil I used and heard it was Mobil One they instructed me to use a thicker synthetic as they have seen a few early failures on Mobil including a Skyline GTR owner who switched to Mobil and had both Turbines fail 1,500 miles later.

Mark Tanguy