The straight-up needle thing is great.
My 914 gauges were refaced by Hartmut at Palo Alto. There is or was also a Hartmut at North Hollywood.
The glare makes it a little hard to see but my temp gauge is like Stan's.
I don't know why Hartmut made all the gauge labels English except oil pressure.
BTW, I did "calibrate" my candy thermometer in boiling water and it came out within a degree. On that 95 deg day run, as mentioned, the needle went all the way over. It took a while to do so, but slowly it made it. I might have driven it that way for 15 or 20 mins, as I was just that far from home. I did have fresh oil in there at the start of the trip. Brad-Penn 10w-30. Did not seem to bother the oil, did not pass any to speak of, no color change. And being a bit thin at those temps, I did get a drop or two on the floor while it cooled down. Mostly, the engine does not drip any, although it does seem to weep some. I rarely add oil between changes. FWIW.
Another thought, maybe suggested by Gordon: some sort of blockage in the stock oil cooler vanes? Do they get dirty? Can they be inspected w/out a teardown? My mice seem to prefer the back of the cabin where I keep my rags and such, and the frunk. That said, my anti-mouse system using peanut butter in traps outside the car seems to have kept that problem at bay for a while.
Txs for all the advice about plumbing design and parts. Is there just one cooler mfr to get, say from Jbugs or CB? I'll have to research . . . I think I'll downplay "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and emphasize "well, it cant hurt"
I have an ultrasonic mouse repeller in my garage.
But, I don't know if that is actually the reason I don't have mice in the garage.
I thought I was seeing mouse droppings in the garage attic but they were bat droppings. The bats were getting in at the ridge vents.
@Michael McKelvey posted:I thought I was seeing mouse droppings in the garage attic but they were bat droppings. The bats were getting in at the ridge vents.
Man, I'm sorry. I hate bats.
They are gone now. The ridge vents were covered with mesh things. A one-way outlet was left for any still in the attic.
Ultrasonic repeller? Pls say more.
First thing I did after house was finished was add galvanized hardware cloth plus window screening to the attic gable vents. The bats, which I do have around the house and don't mind, have roosted up in the louvers against the screening from time to time. I did mount a bat house on a tree some ways off rom the house, but can't tell you if they have ever used it. they eat very large quantities of bugs, and I'm good with that.
This is what I have in the garage:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod...le?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Amazon says currently unavailable. But, if you do a search you will find others like it.
Kelly, once again I'll share some wisdom born of my many mistakes. I'd completed a rebuild and then spent some time wiring some sensors. The car started right up and within 15 minutes was edging over into high temp country on the gauge.
The candy thermometer confirmed that it was really overheating and after a couple of days of scratching my head and trying this and that, I reached behind the shroud and ran my hand around inside the fan.
Two paper towels had been left somewhere in the engine compartment after I finished working on the engine and they had gotten sucked into the fan. After expressing both my admiration of my keen diagnostic skills and turning the air blue expressing my low opinion of my ability to keep track of loose paper towels in as tiny a place as our engine compartments, I pulled the offending objects out.
Of course it ran perfectly after that.
Mike, I once had similar experience, not with paper towels, but with a portion of foam rubber used to seal between tins and body. I was "improving" in that area and a small piece got loose and sucked in to the fan, stuck in the blades. Engine heated up right smartly. Did not take too long to discover the root cause. That was several years ago.
@Michael McKelvey posted:This is what I have in the garage:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod...le?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Amazon says currently unavailable. But, if you do a search you will find others like it.
Do they have a nuclear powered version for Florida?
.
Late to this thread and, I know, I know, we're already on to ultrasonic bat removal devices, but maybe there's room for one more oil gauge post?
As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of Speedster drivers — those who are obsessive enough to calibrate their oil temp gauges and have the gauges rescreened so that they give accurate temp readings in real numbers, like this:
— and then, there are the rest of us, who leave our uncalibrated, unmarked gauges alone and sort of get on with life.
You probably have guessed into which camp I fall.
We're the same dudes who put all the screwdrivers in one drawer instead of making a rack for them over the work bench that assigns each one its own labelled holder.
My own excuse is that I've never wanted to put the car out of service long enough to send the gauges out to a specialty shop. Maybe if I lived in one of the forsaken corners of this country where winter settles in with a death grip for unbroken spells of several months, I'd have proper gauges by now. But I don't.
But I've come to grips with my unmarked gauge and its uncertain parentage. I did the candy thermometer thing pretty early on and found that center gauge is just a smidge over 200 degrees. And after watching the gauge and what it tells me in all sorts of driving and weather conditions, I've found I can get most of the useful information out of it that you would want from a temp gauge.
I've got an extended 'thin-line' sump that adds about a quart and a half capacity, an external filter, and a one-size-too-big Setrab cooler in the wheel well, all of which (including the oil lines) makes the total capacity almost six quarts.
Most of the time, the gauge is around the middle, slightly above in times of stress. The important thing is the cooler is able to control the temperature in any conditions. The needle may settle at various places on the dial, but it never starts climbing towards the red without stopping. (But if it ever does, it's best to shut down way before the needle actually reaches the red.)
The gauge may be unmarked on its face, but years of watching it in all conditions have led me to see these 'marks' as I drive:
Copy that. I was definitely flirting wit the red. Was not happy about it. eked out the last few miles to the garage and shut it down.
