Ok, so here's an update for you guys.
I bought a center mount header a while ago in hopes to free the exhaust up some and also let me keep my AC and either reduce or eliminate the need to modify my heater box. Well, after setting the turbo onto the tube header, i noticed a problem....
The turbo outlet and exhaust outlet was trying to route itself through the side of the block, and obviously, thats not going to work all that well. After looking at a couple of options (fabricating a 90 degree elbow, clocking the turbo, which would only work for the cold side) the tube header had to be scrapped for now in favor of the stock header. So after pulling the turbo off and swapping it back to the stock one, we noticed the stock one was cracked pretty badly. So out comes the welder for some repair work.
Next was the job of pulling of the exhaust outlet to replace the 3 broken bolts in it. That turned into fixing 5 broken bolts as after 20 years of heat cycling those bolts, they were pretty much dust when you put any pressure on them. Then it was 4 days of drilling with dull bits, broken taps and a bunch of torch work just to get some holes to put bolts in.
Then, were about done drilling and tapping, and my dad asks me why were wasting out time on a junk turbo. Im like wth??? And shows me this....
Great!!! To pretty decent cracks to deal with. Luckily after some cutting wheel work, we found the end of the cracks and was able to weld her back up.
I cleaned the two surfaces up and put a few coats of high temp header paint in between the two to help seal it up, and the turbo was finally ready to be bolted to the block like so...
So i finished plumbing the rest of engine to the turbo, or as much of it as i could while its on the engine stand. So thats how it sits today, in the last pic, waiting to be taken off the engine stand. I have to put it on the hoist so i can put the clutch on, and finish making some new coolant lines to replace some crimped ones.