Hey guys, I have a 98 gs I'm currently doing a GTE swap on and I have the motor in the care and just found out about this turbo to heater core clearance issue. I can take some pictures tomorrow but that do I do about it. For those who may know can I just cut off the casting on the rear turbo inlet or will that leave a hole? Any info or links to posts that talk about this because I've been searching for a while. Thanks.

 

The casting can be ground some, but it is hollow under there it's not a solid protrusion. You really need to bend the heater core tube up and towards the motor as much as you can. It is pretty fragile thin aluminum though so it's easy to kink.

The hose from it used to feed the idle air control valve, but the VVTI TB handles idle internally now.

In the pic below you can see on the non-vvti version there is hose in this location, on the vvti version they cast it without the hole instead just eliminating it completely (I suppose it was cheaper this way). This is why the hump is there, it was functional on the previous generation. It's too bad they didn't remove it completely because it the main clearance issue for the usdm gs swap. It's a non-issue in the aristo because the heater core is on the other side of the car.

You could take the elbow off then cut it, get it welded and then ground flush. But the best all around solution is just go single!

NON-VVTI



VVTI

 

Thanks, ended up just bending it and it worked out last week. Maybe you can pm me some info on manual swapping I plan on going R154 a little later this year now that I got the car running and am about to go big single.