Trying to fix the smoky turbo

As mentioned previously, there are three of us that have gone into this project, one person with a lot of mechanical knowledge and will fix anything, a second with good general technical knowledge about cars and myself with little mechanical or technical knowledge. I know the basics but I am clueless when it comes to getting my hands dirty, I am hoping that I will soon start to learn.

If things were simple we'd all live near to one another, but we don't, and the best mechanic out of the three of us is 100s of miles away, things are never simple. As the car currently spends time at my house I get sent mechanical tasks via email by the person 100s of miles away. The first of these tasks is to try and work out how fried our turbo is and see what is causing it to smoke (intermittently).

My first task was to try and understand if oil is getting into the turbo itself and if it was how much. If there was a lot then we knew the turbo was pretty gone, if not a lot then more investigation maybe required.

Quite a simple test of;
1). Running the car for 5 minutes to warm it up
2). Disconnecting the intercooler pipe to see if any oil was in the housing

3). Disconnecting the air filter pipe to see if there was any sign of any oil

4). Finally, seeing if there was any play in the turbo shaft.

Surprisingly I managed to pull the task off and a stubborn air filter was the only mild complication. The only downside to the work was that there was no visible signs of oil in either of the places we were expecting and only a little play in the turbo shaft. This left us a little confused as we had believed the test would have proven positive with regards to the oil.

Doing this work also allowed us to find the serial number of the turbo to try and see what we had under the bonnet. To our disappointment we found only a standard T2. I wonder what happened to the KTR230 that was originally on it?

As we've now discovered the turbo is pretty standard and the rest of the engine has apparently been upgraded, (larger intercooler, uprated carb) we've now taken the plunge and bought a T28 with the hope that this will stop the smoking, but if not will give us a better turbo to build our track bitch.

The turbo is a newly reconditioned T28 Garrett which has had little/no use (apparently). We've paid £250 for it off eBay, so taken a little gamble. Fingers crossed it'll be goodun.