Not sure on the maintenance history, but I can find out from my friend.

I didn't think blowing the turbo would drop oil pressure to absolutely zero. When the turbo blew on my CRX, it still had decent oil pressure.

I guess it could be a top end issue, not something I'd thought of before. Is there any easy way to check that on these? Normally I'd just pull the spark plugs and take a look around, can't really do that here though haha.

Pretty easy to look at the valves. There's only one bolt holding each valve cover on.

How do you know the oil pressure went to zero? If you were looking at a gauge tapped into the top of the oil filter where the turbo feed comes from it may have read zero there and still been good everywhere else.

Like BC said, you have to work pretty hard to screw up the oil pump on these engines.

My sender is where the stock oil pressure send was, so if I don't have pressure in the main galley, I'm pretty sure there isn't any anywhere. And I did randomly pull a couple of the valve covers, didn't see anything wrong. I'll pull them all next time I get some free time, maybe I'll see something. Thanks for the advice.

Slight update, I've finally got a place to work on this and it's getting towed there tomorrow. I've also been shopping around for replacement turbos. Should I get another H1C, a high mileage HX35 for cheap, or an H1E? I'm not too up on turbos for big engines like these, nor do I know differences in Holsets that well.

I would find out whats wrong first before shopping a turbo... It might be the least you issues.

I'm betting case bolt or top end issue as well...

If I was replacing the turbo on my 1st Gen I'd use an HE351CW like found on the last of 5.9 commonrails:

eBay - HE351CW

Used turbos are a crapshoot. Lost of people trying to unload junk turbos on eBay, etc. I wouldn't recommend that except possibly from a known good source, like a friend who can truthfully verify the mileage and condition of it.

it could be the turbo was making all that noise when it blew. lost pressure there and showed that on the guage. if u plan on fixing the truck even if its got a blown motor then go ahead and get a better turbo on there and check it out. that drain plug has a lot of material on it but looks like its all somewhat normal material just a lot of it so keep your fingers crossed and bolt on a massize turbo :jump:
on the kdp did you look at all the bolts behind the cover? i cant remember what they go into but there are a few behind the gears that work themselfs loose and can be just as bad as the kdp coming out.

I realize that I should find the actual issue before I start buying stuff like a replacement turbo, but I'm also on a really tight time schedule here so I wanna get all of the variables figured out as soon as I can.

As nice as that HE351CW looks, that's a little over twice what my turbo budget is at the moment.

When I did the KDP, I really didn't look at all the rest of the bolts. Now that the truck is inside somewhere that I can work on it, I'll be able to pull the front cover and see what actually happened. I'm gonna pull the valve covers, too. I should be able to do that sometime this week, so I'll keep this updated.

If you have a toasted motor you schedule is gonna be shot. You really need to find whats wrong first. I have a feeling your gonna have plenty of time to find and order a turbo.

I had a couple hours free today to wrench on it and I was able to get a ton done. I pulled all of the valve covers and found no signs of any top end damage. I removed the turbo while I was waiting for the radiator to drain, and once the radiator was out I was able to pull the front cover. As soon as the cover came off, this fell out:

http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphot...5_347499_n.jpg

Just as I had thought, a bolt contacted one of the pump gears and set it askew. As such, gear that does the pumping of the oil wasn't spinning, which explains my lack of oil pressure. Here's what the oil pump looked like after I pulled the four bolts that hold it in:

http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphot...97780603_n.jpg

Miraculously, nothing else inside of the front cover was damaged. I'm thinking I got super lucky on this one, but there's still one loose end: I have no idea where that bolt came from. Even with the radiator pulled, there's still not a ton of room to see in there. I looked around for quite a while, and I can't find a hole that's missing a bolt. Its definitely not the KDP bolt, because that one's still there. Any ideas?