Someone mentioned this here a while ago so today I went for another test drive and looked under the hood and saw some rust beginning to form on the turbo on a MCS that had 40 miles on it. I'm just wondering other than aesthetic issues does anyone foresee this being a problem 5, 7 or 10 years from now?

 

My '07 MCS turbo is still gleaming silver/gray metal. No rust at all a this point with about 1900 miles on it. Possible that car you saw is abused on test drives? "Demo" cars get the abuse almost similar to rental cars at certain delaerships.

 

Heat shield, turbo, intake.??....My heat shield has a patina of oxides (as expected) but no indication of anything else looking like "rust".
Just guessing: it's not a rusting, rotting turbo.

 

How much abuse can a car with 40 miles really have. Maybe they just had it in the parking lot for a while but even then at most they could have had it for 6 months or so.

It looked like this:
http://www.mini2.com/forum/2nd-gen-f...ours-pics.html

But not as bad. Looked like the rust was just starting to form. I guess I saw it on that website not on this one.

 

If the turbo looks like those pics then it may just be a bad coating on the turbo itself. A lot can happen in 40 miles with a delaer demo car. I have seen sales guys drive the cars hard and furious (as well as customers wanting to push the car). It could jut very well be an off coating or manufacturing of that unit.

 

That rust doesn't matter, the squirrel cage is on the inside of the housing. As long as the bearings don't get coked every thing will be OK. I have a turbo on my truck that makes that thing look runty and it's all covered in rust, no problema in over 350,000 miles. Relax, coating or not it will rust after a few cold hot cycles.

 

Coating? There is no coating there. it's just plain exposed iron/steel - that gets extremely hot. a light coat of rust isn't unusual or bad. The rest of the car will be history before it gets bad enough to affect anything. I have a feeling if you look at the turbos on any car you'll find some rust - same as your brake rotors where the pads don't touch. It doesn't take very long for light rusting to occur on exposed iron.

 

I concur. That picture is of cast iron. Cast iron's surface rust is a skin. It won't rust beyond the surface.

 

If you've ever looked at old exhaust manifolds, they're made of cast iron, and they'll look exactly the same. They build up a layer of oxidation, then stay that way. You'll never see them rust much further, much less fail due to rust. The exhaust gases are VERY hot. So can't use pretty paints or anything. Limits what you can do, what materials you can use. So the cheapest thing that's good for this is cast iron so that's what they use. And it's only aesthetic.