Double post, yay!
In the original setup I had a gauge for water temperature and oil pressure. The water temperature gauge is electronic, but the oil pressure one is mechanical! So there's a thin tube running all the way to the side of the engine block. But the thing is, the gauge is slow and not immediately visible. I wanted a way of having an instant warning on oil pressure. So I got a T-piece to insert between the engine block and the pressure gauge pick up line. This allowed me to add an electronic pressure switch, adjusted to switch when pressure drops below 10 PSI or something like that.
I wired it so that an ultra-bright yellow LED near the pressure gauge comes on when pressure is low, so it is very easy to spot.
Another thing was the oil temperature. I thought, with the engine of this age it will not hurt to warm it up properly before pushing, and water temperature doesn't tell the whole story. So I added a temperature sensor. This is where it's connected:
What you see there between the oil filter and the block is a so called sandwich plate. This plate is a pickup point for an oil cooler this car has installed.Only one line is connected there, the other one is hanging loose, which makes it look like it goes into the filter, don't be confused
So on the side of this sandwich plate was a plug, which I replaced by the bright red adapter into which the temperature sensor goes.
It's a pipe thread, very visibly conical. The idea is that you screw it in once, applying sufficient torque, which crushes the threading, sealing the connection.
And the oil filter hangs just in front of the radiator:
So anyway, I have the sensor, how do I monitor it? I only have 3 little gauges on the dash: fuel level, water temp and oil pressure. There isn't really place to drill another hole for a gauge and make it look good, I would need a new dashplate for that. Alternative would be to get a double gauge, like this. It's a very cool solution, but it wouldn't fit from an aesthetic point of view - the rest of my gauges are Smiths
So it decided to do a common hack, use water temp gauge for 2 purposes, adding a toggle switch under it to select the mode of operation. This is what it looks like (couldn't find a better pic, sorry):
Left gauge is oil pressure and right one is water temp. The toggle switch between them selects the mode for the water temp gauge. When it's pointing towards the oil gauge - oil temp sensor is connected, and when it's pointing towards the water temp gauge - water temp sensor is connected. Simple! My reasoning was, that oil temperature reading is not necessarily needed after it reaches a certain point, so it will only be used for warmups, after which the switch goes into the water position. You can see the LED I was talking about there as well, between gauges on the top. It's small, but believe me - it's bright
In the original setup I had a gauge for water temperature and oil pressure. The water temperature gauge is electronic, but the oil pressure one is mechanical! So there's a thin tube running all the way to the side of the engine block. But the thing is, the gauge is slow and not immediately visible. I wanted a way of having an instant warning on oil pressure. So I got a T-piece to insert between the engine block and the pressure gauge pick up line. This allowed me to add an electronic pressure switch, adjusted to switch when pressure drops below 10 PSI or something like that.
I wired it so that an ultra-bright yellow LED near the pressure gauge comes on when pressure is low, so it is very easy to spot.
Another thing was the oil temperature. I thought, with the engine of this age it will not hurt to warm it up properly before pushing, and water temperature doesn't tell the whole story. So I added a temperature sensor. This is where it's connected:
What you see there between the oil filter and the block is a so called sandwich plate. This plate is a pickup point for an oil cooler this car has installed.Only one line is connected there, the other one is hanging loose, which makes it look like it goes into the filter, don't be confused
So on the side of this sandwich plate was a plug, which I replaced by the bright red adapter into which the temperature sensor goes.
It's a pipe thread, very visibly conical. The idea is that you screw it in once, applying sufficient torque, which crushes the threading, sealing the connection.
And the oil filter hangs just in front of the radiator:
So anyway, I have the sensor, how do I monitor it? I only have 3 little gauges on the dash: fuel level, water temp and oil pressure. There isn't really place to drill another hole for a gauge and make it look good, I would need a new dashplate for that. Alternative would be to get a double gauge, like this. It's a very cool solution, but it wouldn't fit from an aesthetic point of view - the rest of my gauges are Smiths
So it decided to do a common hack, use water temp gauge for 2 purposes, adding a toggle switch under it to select the mode of operation. This is what it looks like (couldn't find a better pic, sorry):
Left gauge is oil pressure and right one is water temp. The toggle switch between them selects the mode for the water temp gauge. When it's pointing towards the oil gauge - oil temp sensor is connected, and when it's pointing towards the water temp gauge - water temp sensor is connected. Simple! My reasoning was, that oil temperature reading is not necessarily needed after it reaches a certain point, so it will only be used for warmups, after which the switch goes into the water position. You can see the LED I was talking about there as well, between gauges on the top. It's small, but believe me - it's bright
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