Dispute SteamSpeed STX 78R BB N55 Turbo (aka stage 2.5) - specs & details

[Tony@VargasTurboTech]

By Steamspeed upgrade you meant to type, Snail Turbo / Sumalaya N55 upgrade right?

That is not the correct price in the link, you contact them, and they give you the actual price.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Snail-Turb...Ball-Bearing-CHRA-N55-B03-Turbo-/132126728564

Also, I hate to break it to you but the current restriction in the N55 stock frame upgrades is the stock turbofold design. It's not designed for high flow, at anything over 525WHP or so back pressure is through the roof, this is why the majority of the N55 stock frame upgrades do not last long.

This is also the same manufacturer that created the BB N54 CHRA's everyone clamored over for a couple months until they all failed, and results were never posted, those disappeared as well. Not saying these won't work well, as the bigger CHRA is more suited for the BB than the small N54 CHRA's but something to think about.

Why did we invest the money to have a BB CHRA when a compressor wheel will flow what if flows even using a cheaper JB CHRA and hypothetically make similar peak power?

It's insulting to tell people you "invested" money to have this CHRA made. These have been available for quite some time, and SteamSpeed had nothing to do with the development of these CHRA's you are simply buying them from the manufacturer...

 

[sam@steamspeed]

Tony,

We have been manufacturing turbochargers for several years now and sell hundreds of them a quarter. It is very important to us to get the details right and make a reliable high-quality high-performance product. We warranty all of our products for a year, so we would go out of business doing warranty claims if our products failed to meet these standards.

Just because we exist and sell BMW turbo products, I am not sure why that should make you feel so vulnerable and/or bothered such that you feel like you need to come at another company in such an adversarial manner. Let your innovation or even skill as an engineer do the talking instead of trolling. When so many of your Focus RS turbos were failing and your customers were so angry and resellers were dumping and trashing your brand, it would have been so easy taken cheap shots, but it isn't classy, so we didn't.

However, if you want to have a technical discussion about the Engineering merits of our products; then by all means, I am open to respectful hearing your opinion. Lets have that engineering discussion. Engineering is always an exercise of balancing trade offs. There are reasons for why we make our choices.

In the case of our new N55 BB product:

You are correct in that we are not the first ever to have a 3D printed CHRA. I am not sure how that is a negative except it increases our manufacturing BOM costs. We actually already have tooling for a cast N55 CHRA that we could have used, but we wanted to make this larger turbo BB. Why? For the same reasons why your JB rebuild Focus RS turbo kept failing. It will be more reliable and durable and higher performance than a JB CHRA. Also, even though we have the design and model for this BB CHRA for N55, the new tooling for tooling for making it cast would cost $8k. You can do math on the ROI. We will keep 3D printing until the ROI makes sense.

Yes, we know that the OEM turbine housing is restrictive, so that is one tradeoff we took on this model. We know that it could limit peak flow. That is where the BB CHRA comes in and helps a lot.

I think you cannot argue that a JB CHRA would be superior than a BB CHRA if all other things are equal; I see no valid case here JB is better except for costing the manufacturer less. Especially given the OEM manifold, the BB CHRA will be a huge advantage. It will be a lot more durable against the lateral loads, and we should see a lot lower failure rate than exiting JB products. In terms of performance, it will be way more responsive on and off of the boost. In terms of managing the backpressure of the OEM housings, it will be way more efficient. That means it will make a lot more power than JB products when the pressure ratios exceed 2:1. So, our BB CHRA will be better than any JB product on the market in every important quality and performance measure. This is not a dig on anyone who has some other JB product, it is just the engineering reality. We have published detailed testing on JB vs using our FA20 product which suffers from backpressure if you care to read about it.

Anyway, feel free to argue the engineering merits. I am happy to have that conversation. I honestly think you could have some great insights that would benefit the community.

-Sam

 

[9krpmrx8]

Nothing else from Tony? That's surprising.

 

[TEC]

In usual Tony fashion, he ran away from the site when he couldn't bully the admin.

 

[sam@steamspeed]

In usual Tony fashion, he ran away from the site when he couldn't bully the admin.

Sadly it common to have vendor and vendor violence on forums. Most forms forbid it and have rules against it. This form is no exception. It isn't good for the comunity to have vendors trash each other and treat each other antagonistically. Mods typically delete the posts, or ban the vendor if they don't shape up.

Nearly everthing in this dispute section has Tony's fingerprints on it, so maybe he finally got him self banned for being toxic and constantly breaking the form vendor rules. Who knows. I would be sad because I am sure he can provide good value to the comunity.

Personally I perfer to work with other companies rather than fight with them. For example, when Turbosmart complained to our distrubotor about actuators, we just worked out a deal to buy theirs. Win-Win. It is a scarcity vs abundance mentality.