Oil Pressure Indication

[azruss]

the gage sending unit is the big one on the back of the housing. 19mm wrench will do the job from underneath, but you will need to remove the oil filter.

[aj81spider]

Azruss - are you sure? The guage sending unit I ordered looks just like what is mounted on the top. The one on the side looks pretty easy, as you say, because you can get it from underneath the car.

Seebelt - I'm worried about grabbing it with channel locks and mangling it in case I still can't get it out. RIght now the guage is wrong, but I can drive the car.

And Exit98 - thanks for bringing the discussion back to the question!

[seabeelt]

It is definitely the larger one. Mine is mounted on top which is why i used the channel locks. The rear mounted one is much easier to get a wrench onto it.
R/

[131]

But no one answered AJ's question, which is the same one I have, how do you get the damn thing off?

If it's that hard to get at, can the oil filter housing be removed from the block?

[aj81spider]

I'll look at that tomorrow Mick. That might be easier.

[phaetn]

I have a mechanical oil pressure gauge installed on my 2L. At start cold I show around 70psi, settles to around 50-60 at idle and then when warm down to around 50psi. 20-50 oil, outside air around 17-22 deg C. When driving it moves up or down depending on rpm as it should I suppose.
20 at start is low in my opinion. Oil level? , no crunched oil pan?
Chris

While this isn't helpful about getting the sender off, it might help with readings.

I also have a mechanical unit in conjunction with the factory gauge.

The mechanical unit almost never drops below 20 PSI, even when the 20W50 oil is hot and the engine drops to a very low idle when the fan comes on (I always have the headlights on, too). In these instances the dash gauge can drop right to zero or even off (pegged on left side), sometimes flicking between off and a low reading; it quickly jumps back to life with a blip of the throttle. I don't have a sender for the red warning light as that's where the mechanical copper line is hooked up.

When cold, PSI can be as high as 80 or even 90 (lower when using 15W40 oil) but typically is in the 40-60PSI range when driving around and engine is warm. Even when pressure is so high when cold the dash gauge never seems to climb high, but does have the aforementioned drop.

Cheers,
phaetn

[azruss]

Here is a picture of the oil pressure sending unit in place. I thought about removing the entire casting, but opted to pull the oil filter instead pulling the bolts for the housing is a problem as the sending units are in the way. No easy peasy here.

[aj81spider]

Your engine (beautiful by the way) is different than mine. Perhaps they changed the later Spiders. Mine has that sender on the top of the oil filter mount. With the sender on top I can get a socket on all four mount bolts so I will probably go that route as soon as I get a few spare hours.

[seabeelt]

A.J. Im guessing more like this:

[aj81spider]

That's exactly what mine looks like.

Been out of town for the weekend, but am going to try to attack it again tomorrow.

[aj81spider]

Pulled the oil filter mount off today. That was quite easy - the 4 bolts were accessible and it came right off.

Bolted the cover to a board then was able to use a long handled wrench to get the old sensor off. Cleaned up the housing, painted the new sensor so it wouldn't rust (like the old one) and installed it on the housing.

Then I realized I didn't have the gasket and called AutoRicambi. With any luck it will get here by Saturday so I can put the engine back together!

Here's the assembly ready for installation and the old sensor next to it:

[aj81spider]

Because I know that people have been asking themselves "what ever happened to that oil pressure problem?" I'll close this out. As detailed earlier I removed the oil filter mount to get the sensor off. This cascaded into lots of other jobs (crankcase breather oil leak, new radiator, air fuel ratio sensor install) so that my car has been off the road for quite a while. Finally got it all back together and took it out for a ride tonight (a little cool, but had to be done!).

I'm happy to report that the new sensor fixed the problem. Oil pressure was rock solid the whole drive, even when the car warmed up fully (which was when it went to 0 previously).

One minor problem fixed - lots more to go!

[rontron]

I'm running 20/50 rotella. I get 40-50 psi when cold at start up, normal when warm and at speed is 20-30 and just above 0 when at idle. If you look at some of the early road and track articles for the new model years, this happend even when new. When I first got this car, the PO had a resistor wired in parallel to the sender to make the gauge read higher.
R/

The PO being who and how did he wire the sensor? I want to do that. I put in a mechanical because of light readings were driving me crazy and the tube somehow came out of the sending unit and I blew out my bearings but the crank was ok so I just replaced the bearings and ran it again only to have the damn tube break off and come out of the sending unit somehow but this time i stopped the car before I heard the bearings making noise.........replaced with the electronic and now reading 5 to 20 at warm up again instead of the 20 to 40 the mechanical gauge was giving me.........Would love to know how to make the electronic gauge read higher........Maybe another type car like a Alfa or something would read differently.

[rontron]

I have a mechanical oil pressure gauge installed on my 2L. At start cold I show around 70psi, settles to around 50-60 at idle and then when warm down to around 50psi. 20-50 oil, outside air around 17-22 deg C. When driving it moves up or down depending on rpm as it should I suppose.
20 at start is low in my opinion. Oil level? , no crunched oil pan?
Chris

While this isn't helpful about getting the sender off, it might help with readings.

I also have a mechanical unit in conjunction with the factory gauge.

The mechanical unit almost never drops below 20 PSI, even when the 20W50 oil is hot and the engine drops to a very low idle when the fan comes on (I always have the headlights on, too). In these instances the dash gauge can drop right to zero or even off (pegged on left side), sometimes flicking between off and a low reading; it quickly jumps back to life with a blip of the throttle. I don't have a sender for the red warning light as that's where the mechanical copper line is hooked up.

When cold, PSI can be as high as 80 or even 90 (lower when using 15W40 oil) but typically is in the 40-60PSI range when driving around and engine is warm. Even when pressure is so high when cold the dash gauge never seems to climb high, but does have the aforementioned drop.

Cheers,
phaetn

BEWARE MY FRIEND..............Something you might have not thought about that happened to me is that the tube breaks or comes out of the sending unit like it did to me after two days of installation and before I noticed the pressure drop I trashed my bearings. Luckily not the crank though so I could fix it from underneath without pulling the engine. Thinking it was a one off situation I left the mechanical gauge on it and simply replaced the fitting at the sender unit and guess what it failed again and lost all my oil but stopped the car before I trashed the bearings this time.....So I'm going back to the electronic gauge. JUST SAYING........LOL