Quote:
Originally Posted by davids2toys
FWIW, just a few thoughts on weird oil temps:
1) The builder of my car actually had the water temp gauge sender screwed into the oil pan and the oil sender screwed into the hole for the water sensor. He actually drove it like this for ten years! Those gauges and senders are identical except one is labeled water and one is labeled oil. I thought I had a faulty water gauge because it was actually reading oil temp at the pan which is nothing close to the water temp at the top of the engine. It would also behave funny. The water temp would read about 180, but when you started driving above 3000 RPM for any reason, the water temp gauge temp would start rising very quickly and the only way to make the temp come down would be to drive easier to keep the RPM under 3000. When I asked the previous owner he said it had always done that and he had just gotten used to it.
2) I bought a new pan from Canton about 5 years ago, still not installed...LOL I had them weld in a new bung much lower so I could be sure the bulb was submerged in oil at all times. I did not like the stock canton higher location for the obvious reasons. To me it was barely in the oil at full, so if you were not at full oil level or driving aggressively you had a very good chance of reading the air temp in the oil pan. They liked my idea and told me they would consider a design change. I don't know if they ever did this going forward |
So does the oil temperature in the pan differ depending on where the oil temperature is measured? I have an Aviad oil pan and the sensor is placed very low in the pan at about the same elevation as the drain plug. The oil temperature just barely gets to a point that I would call acceptable. I have an oil cooler installed and I blocked off air flow to the heat exchanger trying to bring the oil temperature up. It didn't come up very much. Plus the pan hangs down a little bit so that the lower 20% or so of the pan is probably in the air stream passing under the car. My hope is that the oil that is being pumped to the bearings is actually hotter than that which is at the sensor and what I am seeing on the gauge. Is this just wishful thinking?
BD