Temp Gauge - Numbers? Options

[AndrewBlyholder]

It's always been a pet peeve of mine that there are no numbers on the 914 temperature gauge. I want to know the actual temperature the engine is running at, dammit!!

Someone's probably already posted this years ago, but I wanted to do it for myself, so while I have my motor out and I'm rebuilding it, I set up a test rig and to measure the temperatures through the entire range of the gauge. My measurement device was a new candy thermometer that I can read to within 1 deg. F. It didn't come with any specification for it's accuracy, but I figured it would be within a degree or two and that's plenty good enough for this job.



And here's what I came up with:



The scale isn't at all linear. It's much compressed at both the bottom and the top. As we all probably knew, you should be running with the needle mostly straight up and down. What was news to me was just how bad things are getting if you get anywhere close to the red zone. The start of the red bar is 320, the middle is 350, and the upper end is 400. So it you get to the red, time to switch it off immediately!

Attached is a PDF of my gauge overlay for your own use. Hope this is helpful or of interest to others. Anyway, I had fun doing it.

Andrew B.

 914_Oil_Temp_Gauge_Markings.pdf ( 11.56k ) Number of downloads: 94