In this installment, I pulled the downpipe loose from the turbo, removed the crossover pipe, pulled the intercooler, and took off the throttle body and its related cables and connections. 

Enough smalltalk! On to the pictures! (which should take seven minutes flat at 28.8k. Unless you’re on AOL, in which case you should go to bed and check in the morning to see how far it got before you were unceremoniously dumped)

Wow. That came apart easy… I was worried for nothing!

Here’s the crossover pipe. Two observations:

1. It looks kinda dinky to carry the effluvia from three cylinders all by itself, doesn’t it?
2. Air tools kick ass. You must buy a compressor NOW if you do not already own one. Don’t even finish reading this sent…

Here’s the intercooler. I didn’t realize it was painted until I got it off - the paint on the bottom is all peeling. There’s also a Garrett data plate on the bottom. Both of these facts would be apparent had I thought to take a picture of the underside, instead of the part that everyone can see all the time. D’oh! I’ll do it for the next update, I promise!

So once the IC is off, here’s what you see - A PCV system that is caked with 10 years’ worth of gunk. Disgusting.

The throttle body is off! There are lots of interesting things to notice in this photo. My mother always used to say that photos without a person in them were boring, so I included my hand here for "human interest". You can also see the infamous coolant ports by my thumb and against my palm. In other applications that use this same throttle body, the ports are used to circulate warm engine coolant through passages inside the throttle body to keep it from icing up in cold weather. SyTy’s don’t have this problem, as the turbo is pretty effective at keeping intake temperatures above the frost point, so the ports are vestigial (look it up!) on our trucks. Finally, note that it looks pretty clean here on the intake side of the throttle plates…

The manifold side is another story. But wait! There’s more!

Here’s what the inside of the upper intake manifold looks like. I’m surprised the truck ran at all. I can’t wait to get it apart and see what it looks like from the other side…

Another view of the upper intake. Note the stalagmite of crud in the right-hand port. Just looking at this picture makes me want to get a tetanus shot.

So here we are… Sure does seem like there’s a lot of engine left in there…