No oil pressure!

[Stefrobrts]

Luckily, it's my Bronco that has no oil pressure, not my tow vehicle. This past weekend the oil guage in my Bronco began dropping to Low and then bouncing right back up to Normal. I figured the sending unit was going out, because I couldn't imagine an engine condition that would cause the oil pressure to fluxuate like that. So I finally got around to swinging it by a friends house yesterday and he hooked up a mechanical guage and discovered it was idling at 2 pounds of pressure, with 5 pounds at 2000 RPM. It should have been 20-40 pounds. What a nightmare! I'm amazed I didn't fry the engine driving it since Friday like that.

So I did some research and discovered the Bronco's oil guage is really an idiot light. It reads normal above 4 pounds, and low below that. That explains the bouncing between low and normal. This is amazing to me that the limit is set so low, because if you've only got 4 pounds of pressure, that's already so far below normal that lights and buzzers should be going off as far as I'm concerned! So we're going to have a friend tear into the engine and see about fixing it, then sell it ASAP. The darn thing is cursed, but that's another story...

What really concerns me is wondering if the guages in my Ford E150 (my tow vehicle) are the same way. I was already thinking of adding a tranny temp guage, now I think maybe a mechanical oil guage would be a good idea too. I don't want to find out the same thing with my van someday, and not know that something's going wrong until it's too late!

[59toaster]

Thrust bearings. Might be able to drop the pan and fix that for the cost of the bearings and seals. Probably buy another 50k out of the motor if the bearing surface on the crank is not too galled up.

Now why it happend is the question.

What sometimes happens is the torque converter will push against the end of the crank. Kinked cooler lines can cause this by causing too much preasure at the converter. Problem with to high of line pressure can case same problem. Converter not seated correctly (usualy blows the transmission real quick).

[Stefrobrts]

A friend of a friend is going to do it for me. He owns his own machine shop, so he knows his stuff, and he's going to do it in his spare time. So he'll save me some money as a favor but I might not see the truck again for a few weeks. When I get it back , it's out of here. I'll get whatever I can for it and pretend I never made the mistake of buying that thing - it's been nickle and diming me since I brought it home! I'm going to go buy some nice little econo-riceburner to replace it with.

[overlander63]

Originally posted by Stefrobrts
Luckily, it's my Bronco that has no oil pressure, not my tow vehicle. This past weekend the oil guage in my Bronco began dropping to Low and then bouncing right back up to Normal. I figured the sending unit was going out, because I couldn't imagine an engine condition that would cause the oil pressure to fluxuate like that. So I finally got around to swinging it by a friends house yesterday and he hooked up a mechanical guage and discovered it was idling at 2 pounds of pressure, with 5 pounds at 2000 RPM. It should have been 20-40 pounds. What a nightmare! I'm amazed I didn't fry the engine driving it since Friday like that.

So I did some research and discovered the Bronco's oil guage is really an idiot light. It reads normal above 4 pounds, and low below that. That explains the bouncing between low and normal. This is amazing to me that the limit is set so low, because if you've only got 4 pounds of pressure, that's already so far below normal that lights and buzzers should be going off as far as I'm concerned! So we're going to have a friend tear into the engine and see about fixing it, then sell it ASAP. The darn thing is cursed, but that's another story...

What really concerns me is wondering if the guages in my Ford E150 (my tow vehicle) are the same way. I was already thinking of adding a tranny temp guage, now I think maybe a mechanical oil guage would be a good idea too. I don't want to find out the same thing with my van someday, and not know that something's going wrong until it's too late!

Ford went to the "Idiot Gauge" back in the late '80's when they were having a problem with poor oil pressure on some of their engines. The engine would run fine, but have a horribly low oil pressure, their "fix" was the gauge you have. A quick check to see if this is what is on your E150 is to look at the sending unit, if it is a small one, you have the idiot gauge, if it is a large one, mounted on a stalk away from the engine a little bit, you have a true sending unit.
Terry