Turbo wastegate vacuum hose ....

[Gerard <gerard@poboxes.com>]

Hi!

I opened the hood yesterday afternoon to do some checking on my
idle/WOT switch as was suggested to me on this list. (I just put
up another post on that matter to get some more info so that I don't
break the poor thing). I also received some info from a list member
last week on things to check before doing mods. The info, I think,
is a good thing to look  through every so often even if one is not
doing mods. One such thing was to check all vacuum lines for wear and
splitting. Ever since I got this car (1990 200T) 4 months ago the
hose running off the back of the wastegate to a solenoid (??) on the
firewall has had a small bit of the string-braided covering that covers
the rubber tubing, scuffed off. Yesterday I actually reached over to
inspect it. The section missing the covering feels very soft and thin,
while the rest of the hose feels good and solid. And, no, it is not
just the fact that the braiding is off that makes the rubber feel soft
as part of the exposed bit has that solid feel to it. I was just
wandering if this could perhaps be causing problems. Could a weak
hose play havoc with the info the ECU gets about boost? Could it also
perhaps mean that if that hose causes erratic boost readings that the
ECU will compensate erratically? I was just thinking that if that was
the case and if that hose does flex/warp more than it should then could
it be causing the problems I'm  having when doing some relatively
hard running? When I get on full gas and up to about 120km/h doing
about 3500 RPM then the there is this feeling that the nose drops on
the car, like a bit of power loss. There were some posts up here that
I put up regarding that, hence the reason for looking at the idle/WOT
switch.

I guess it would be best to simple replace the hose anyway. What type
of hose will do? What about "spiffy-looking" steel braided lines?
Would this be a good time to shove in a manual boost gauge?

G.
-- 
"a thousand miles from here, there is another person smiling"
1990 Turbo (200T)
name   : gerard van vught
tel    : +27-57-912 2658 (w) / 082 923 9609 (cell)
url    : http://www.acenet.co.za/homepages/gerard/
e-mail : gerard@poboxes.com  / han.solo@galaxycorp.com
         gerard@acenet.co.za / van_vught@frg.issi.co.za