Well, I finally got sick of the ridiculous turbo surge that I was getting with my setup, so I decided I'd try the Tornado and see what happened.
When I first used it on my existing 3" MAF pipe, it dramatically reduced the surge to where I only had a little bit of flutter in the 10-15psi range. I ended up fabbing up a new 3" pipe out of those ricer parts from PimpBoys that included a sharper 60* bend out from the turbo. This, coupled with the Tornado, eliminated all surging and fluttering. For the naysayers: I don't care if I've made a slight restriction in the inlet because, 1) I can't feel a difference/loss in power 2) The car is much more pleasureable to drive now. My turbo surge was so bad in the mid-boost range that my car would buck and the turbo would actually stall sometimes if I tried to maintain say, 10psi boost. Also, I must note that all that violent surging was tearing my turbo up. I have some play in the compressor wheel now on a turbo with only ~10k miles on it.
I do know that the surge has something to do with the direction and flow of air in the inlet track because I've noticed that a sharper bend anywhere pre-turbo in the inlet helps alleviate the surge somewhat. I noticed this before installing the Tornado when I was toying around with different inlet setups. Also, the volume and backpressure between the turbo and motor can be significant contributing factors as well. For example, I have a TA49 with a 3" DP, test pipe, Hooker exhaust, gbodyparts SLIC. In my opinion, all of these components reduced backpressure so much that the TA49 was operating waaay outside of it's map and trying to stuff all that air in an unopened stock motor.
BTW, I ordered my Tornado (part #KI-75) from Amazon for $48 shipped. There were five options for shipping. I selected the first "FREE Super Saver" shipping option (not the one that requires a trial of something) which was supposed to take 5-9 business days. I'm not sure what happened, but I received mine the next day in a FedEx box with a UPS label on it. The packing label still said that I had free shipping.
IT WORKS.
When I first used it on my existing 3" MAF pipe, it dramatically reduced the surge to where I only had a little bit of flutter in the 10-15psi range. I ended up fabbing up a new 3" pipe out of those ricer parts from PimpBoys that included a sharper 60* bend out from the turbo. This, coupled with the Tornado, eliminated all surging and fluttering. For the naysayers: I don't care if I've made a slight restriction in the inlet because, 1) I can't feel a difference/loss in power 2) The car is much more pleasureable to drive now. My turbo surge was so bad in the mid-boost range that my car would buck and the turbo would actually stall sometimes if I tried to maintain say, 10psi boost. Also, I must note that all that violent surging was tearing my turbo up. I have some play in the compressor wheel now on a turbo with only ~10k miles on it.
I do know that the surge has something to do with the direction and flow of air in the inlet track because I've noticed that a sharper bend anywhere pre-turbo in the inlet helps alleviate the surge somewhat. I noticed this before installing the Tornado when I was toying around with different inlet setups. Also, the volume and backpressure between the turbo and motor can be significant contributing factors as well. For example, I have a TA49 with a 3" DP, test pipe, Hooker exhaust, gbodyparts SLIC. In my opinion, all of these components reduced backpressure so much that the TA49 was operating waaay outside of it's map and trying to stuff all that air in an unopened stock motor.
BTW, I ordered my Tornado (part #KI-75) from Amazon for $48 shipped. There were five options for shipping. I selected the first "FREE Super Saver" shipping option (not the one that requires a trial of something) which was supposed to take 5-9 business days. I'm not sure what happened, but I received mine the next day in a FedEx box with a UPS label on it. The packing label still said that I had free shipping.
