Originally Posted By: 4WD
Prolly built with a faulty turbo - they are going to do just that if it goes out ...
^This
I have seen a couple of turbos where the oil deflector on the compressor side was missing entirely. As there is a pretty good vacuum behind the compressor wheel so with oil coming out of the joint it turns it into an oil atomizer. It wasn't too bad at idle when the oil pressure and flow are lower as is the vacuum behind the compressor wheel but when you spooled it up it would spray oil at an alarming rate. An oil flinger that is backwards will also have a similar effect, but is less dramatic.
The other possible one is that the piston rings on the turbine side are missing or were damaged during assembly, this would have a similar effect, but would dump the oil into the exhaust/catalyst rather than filling the induction system.
Both of these result in full boost being available, but smoking like an old freight train.
If the turbo was starved of oil (pinched/bent oil line, etc) it would last for just a few seconds until it friction-welded at the thrust bearing, usually snapping the shaft. Then the compressor wheel runs out the front of the turbo and collides with the compressor cover (think cat with it's tail slammed in a door by accident), and the turbine wheel can slide back and collide with the turbine housing. The oil is now more or less free to pour out of both ends of the turbo, making for a pretty good mosquito fogger. Usually this is immediately noticed by the driver. Nice thing on a gasoline engine is that it just puts on a good show, Diesel engines can eat the lube oil as fuel and can get really exciting when these things happen (ask me how I know....).
Things like this happen from time to time when you have to build thousands of cars, last I looked that plant was cranking out over 200K cars every year (somewhere around 850 to 1000 cars per day). You can be careful trying to engineer out as many failure modes as you can think of, but Murphy always shows up from time to time with a "new contribution" you didn't expect or has never happened before. I have dealt with an over-zealous customs agent picking up a pretty big turbo by a very small oil supply line to inspect it and look underneath, then put it back in it's place. This was an event we didn't expect, and all of the internal handling procedures in the world won't stop something like that from happening. We ended up putting labels on them in multiple languages NOT TO lift the turbo by this component, which everybody in the plant already knew.