Little turbo leak..........Overhaul the engine?

[Gusshr]

Hi,

Finished oil changes heat exchanger cleaning, and was on for the last item of maintenance "a small turbo leak" that is causing smoke in the engine room when run hard (the oil burn on the outside of the riser) because the gravity is guiding the dripping oil underneath the riser´s blanket on this 8V71ti with 3100 hours. (it leaks only after it cools down not during run)

So pulled the turbo for rebuild, and as you can see from the pictures there is damage to the exhaust side and the turbo guys at metro diesel in Miami said it cannot be balanced, I called my mechanic and he said STOP, do not get a rebuild one as the new one will be damaged too. Lets look in the engine air box hatches to see whats wrong.

Now this engine smokes very tiny white smoke on startup but disappears after 5 min run. Otherwise it sounds fine and had no other issues. A high crank case pressure was detected on both engines actually up to 3.5" at the time of the engine survey on this boat.

I asked around and everyone told me as long as the engine starts right up and does not smoke and as long as it runs hard fine then don´t worry about that.

Knowing some about the engines mechanics, I had a discussion with my mechanic (who seems little pessimistic) that if we found anything wrong with further investigation then it will be a major overhaul, and he confirmed.

Now the question is: other than this small leak and the fact that we found dinged exhaust turbo blades as you see from the pictures, do I really wanna pursue this problem to the source and potentially perform a major overhaul? Would you do that too?

The mechanic says you put a newer turbo it will be damaged again, and maybe you end up with broken block. My logic tells me a piece had passed by that turbo ( I had no good history on this boat), I am not sure if this damage had been there for years or happened in the last 100 hours that I have used this boat for so far. Could another piece pass by? yes anything is possible. Could another damage happen anytime? and my answer is yes this is an engine from 1972 I am not going to make new again.

Please advice on what you would do?

Thanks