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.

Click to view attachment

And here's what I came up with:

Click to view attachment

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.

Click to view attachment

From another thread.

As long as this is a means to help convince others to give up on trying to run air cooled engine oil at 180F or 190F I say job well done.

Andrew - thx for posting the results and the PDF. It might be good to add the part numbers of both the sender and the gauge used in the test for future reference?

- Tony

Art supply stores have white rub on numbers on sheets with different font sizes. That’s how I did mine 25 years ago, an article in the Panorama magazine, probably in the upfixin series.

Nice work - I'd second the motion to add which sender and gauge part numbers you used.

Gauge is VDO 310.274/076/001, 12V, made in 12/73

Sender is VDO, 6-12V, 200 deg. C, 801/7/2, made in 10/73

For all engines, water is constantly being added to the oil by the blow-by as a product of combustion. So you need to be running your oil hot enough to be driving out the water and not allowing it to accumulate. That means 210 to 220. 180 to 195 is just plain too cold, I.M.H.O.

Andrew

Yeah, people always talk about getting the engine warm to clean the plugs but really you need to do it for your oil. Everytime I drive I try to get it up into the 220s. Much easier on the mustang vs the 914.

Excellent - thank you