Hey BigRig.....your topic really deserves it's own thread, although bumping this one was pretty cool. Good and cheap turbo might be hard to come by. Depends a lot on how much you can/want to fabricate stuff and if you know anything about how to size a turbo. If you need a plug and play system you're down to ATS, Hypermax and Banks. New, the Hypermax is just under 2 grand, and they are great folks to work with and still actually interested in IDI performance. ATS and Banks have moved on but still have kits on hand, the ATS is just over 2000 but it is often back order and ATS can be a real pain in the rear end company to deal with, some have had great luck with them others use their name as a cuss word. Banks is what it is. Good quality products, overprices, complete kit from stem to stern, almost 3 grand. Unfortunately they use a proprietary design on some of their turbos and runniung down generic parts is not easy if even possible. Beyond that you could find a used kit on ebay or craigslist or from a junkyard. Let the buyer beware you can steal one cheap or cost yourself as much as a new kit if you get a real chewed system and have to order rare parts or fabricate them. Speaking of fabrication if you are or know someone who is good at detailed metal fabrication and you or someone you know is an excellent welder and just knows how things go together a custom turbo setup may be for you. Here there are many options and not enough room to talk about it all, but you must size the turbo to the engine properly, this is especially important in a non wastegated application since a too large turbo will lag like crazy and blow the moor to bits if you get enough fuel to it, and a too small turbo will be safe but boost will be unimpressive even at full fuel. Typ4 and FordGuy100 know a lot about turbos. Typ4 has a lot of real world experience and occasionally rebuilds turbos for guys here. Fordguy is great at math and design and knows compressor maps. We have other guys here that know this stuff too, unfortunately I'm not one of them and have much to learn. I went with a used ATS 088 non gated kit from ebay. I paid 860 for it, not bad, but I had to have it rebuilt including a new compressor wheel. Say what you will about Ken at DPS but he did a nice job for a competitive price, he just held my turbo for months longer than I wanted him to.......and was as tough to contact as his reputation would suggest. I scared up some factory and some custom parts to round out my almost complete kit and 10 months and about 1500 later I was running turbocharged.
