My, it;s been quiet...and a mystery...

[mallick at mail.utexas.edu]

I went out to troubleshoot the symptoms of a leaky turbo bypass valve/hose the
other day (stalling when coming off boost).  TBV and hose were fine, but I did
find that my michelin man hose was mis-clamped at the intake pipe and was
leaking air to the intake.  Aha!  I also tightened the clamp on the little hose
that feeds boost pressure air into the wastegate frequency valve, since that
clamp had become quite loose.

That fixed the "stalling off boost" problem, and the car ran much smoother than
it has in months.  The interesting thing is that my gas mileage went from 19 up
to about 22 over the same daily city/highway route that I drive daily (about 65
mi r/t).  

I'm not complaining :-) but I'm curious as to why the mileage increase.  I
didn't see such an increase when I changed the O2 sensor about 5K miles ago.  I
guess it's little things that count.

Maybe it even fixed my oil consumption problem :-)  

John Mallick
Lago Blue 200q20v, 176K