I have a '97 850 GLT as some of you know by now, I rebuilt the turbo and everything was going great until about a week ago. my other car, an '00 eclipse GT managed to find it's way over top of a 4"x4" piece of steel doing about 60 and I blew a tire and broke a rim. So I found some rims in new jersey (about 2.5 hrs north of where I live in baltimore) so I took my 850 wagon up. It ran great the whole way up and then suddenly on the way back it started blowing out some real black smoke whenever I tried to accelerate quickly. The turbo doesn't feel like it's spooling and the smoke is really starting to get to me. I wasn't sure where to start so I got the codes checked and it said that one of the O2 sensors was bad, so I'm replacing both of those tonight. My question is how hard are they to get to on this car, and what else anybody thinks the problem could be. Any help would be awesome. thanks guys


oh and also my sister drove it right before I left on my trip and she filled up the tank w/ 10% ethanol gas, I doubt that this would cause any problems, but I'm not sure. Thanks.

 

This is the classic symptom of a blown intercooler hose. The front O2 sensor may need to be replaced. However, I would check every hose and clamp between the Air Flow Meter and the Throttle Body. Some folks clamp a large dowl rod at one end and use their cooling system leakdown tester on the other end, to insure that there are no leaks between AFM and TB.

 

honestly I've looked for the intercooler over and over again on this car and I could never seem to see it, like I know where it is, I just can't seem to see it for one reason or another, I'll check all the hoses though, thanks a ton

 

yup, thanks a bunch man, I found a tear in the rubber coupling in between the interooler hose and the throttlebody, I'm replacing all the hoses tomorrow since they're all pretty worn, thanks again