Topic: Best place and type of gauges to get

Hi gang,
I was wondering on your best advise for gauges for our car.  Specifically Oil pressure Oil Temp Water Temp and Wideband O2.

I prefer electrical sending units and I'm looking for decent quality without breaking the bank. or tell me why mechanical sending gauges are ok to use and how to safegaurd (oil in cabin/etc) them.  hence why I tend to like electrical.

If you can give me suggestions on where to get them I'd appreciate it.

I've heard if you call VDO you can get scratch and dent gauges.

BTW our factory gauges do work but aren't the biggest ones to read.

I think we have a budget of $350 for all 4 and I know the wideband will cost more than $100.

DNF Racing 1992 Mazda Miata
"Cheat to win"

2 (edited by VKZ24 2016-09-14 08:20 AM)

Re: Best place and type of gauges to get

Autometer is my gauge of choice, but I prefer 270 degree sweep ones, and they are spendy if you go electric.  I have those in my street car.  In our race car, we run mechanical ones.  We have two Sunpro ones from Advance that were less than $20 each that have worked great for 8 years now.  I don't have the hot oil in the cabin fear myself though as we are using a SS braided line that isn't anywhere near it's limit at only 80PSI.

Captain
Team Super Westerfield Bros.
'93 Acura Integra - No VTEC Yo!

3 (edited by RogueLeader 2016-09-14 09:13 AM)

Re: Best place and type of gauges to get

Autometer is the way to go. 

VDO's lower end products are junk, and their senders are even junkier.  Had them on the Fox originally.  Imprecise, slow to respond, senders are in the garbage because they were garbage.  I have an Oil pressure and Water Temp gauge nearly brand new, you can have them for free, if you hate yourself.

We got ours on Summit Racing or the local speed shop SK Speed.

Tom Lomino - Proud to be a 23x Lemons Loser, 3x Class B, and 1x IOE Winner!
Craptain, Team Farfrumwinnin - 1995 Volkswagen Golf #14
Click here to "Like" us on Facebook   Click here for our Youtube Videos
Lifetime Achievement (of hopelessness) Award Winners

Re: Best place and type of gauges to get

Somewhat related, but I highly recommend getting 3 very bright lights (I prefer red, yellow and white) for oil pressure, temperature, and alternator. Oil pressure switch is usually already on the car, ~230 degree temperature switch is cheap, and then you can save on the gauges (now they only have to be accurate, not easily readable) and tuck them away into a non-priority location.

Because nobody reads gauges every turn, or even every lap. And when they do, the first assumption is "the gauge must be wonky". BTDT.

This WILL save you a race and maybe even a motor, someday.

K Car Stalker

Re: Best place and type of gauges to get

^ if you want to be a real cheapskate like us, get a 3-color taillight assembly for that purpose. Works great.

K Car Stalker

Re: Best place and type of gauges to get

to give further information.  We drive a miata. The miata factory cluster has an actual gauge for oil pressure and water temperature. so those are our failsafes.
We have been using cheap ebay dragon gauges. They worked for one race and now have been a source for tinkering without much success. We made sure we had a good ground, etc.

So I think we are going to go with glowshift gauges. 270 degree sweep, stepper motor.  still cheap.  So where am I off on this?

Also we have started training our drivers to look on the straight to check the gauges.

DNF Racing 1992 Mazda Miata
"Cheat to win"

Re: Best place and type of gauges to get

We have five gauges from Hayden (Summit) and they seem to work. Water temp, engine oil temp, tranny temp, engine oil psi, volts. They were $50 each (middle of the road) and come with mounts and senders. Three lights on the dash: Green (main power on, kill switch), Yellow (radiator fans on, fans are hooked to a temp switch on motor, tells driver to bring car in if temp starts to rise), and Red (low/no oil pressure, bring car in immediately or stop). Thinking about coolant psi, since we lost a hose last race and it took a while for the water temp gauge to rise.

'18 PNW-Organizer's Choice '17 PNW-IOE '15 PNW-Judge's Choice '14 PNW-Heroic Fix
Jagvair 2.0 Build   Jagvair YouTube  Jagvair Facebook

Re: Best place and type of gauges to get

Speedhut makes nice semi-custom stepper-motor-based gauges for about the same price as Autometer.

Scott

Re: Best place and type of gauges to get

For temp, I was recommended these gauges by another team and think they are fantastic:

http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_ … cts_id=357
plus two of these
http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_ … cts_id=134

Easy to read and they are programmable to set high/low alarms (trigger a relay that sets off a horn next to the driver, for example, or spray a mister on the radiator). IMO, much easier to read the digital gauge at a glance than trying to figure out if the car is running at 210F or 215F on the short sweep elec Autometer gauges I had before.

Only complaint is that when I tried to use it as a voltage meter to diagnose a charging issue, I found that it only reads from 0-10V (vs 0-16V which is what I needed). I ended up buying two small voltmeter gauges off eBay for $3/ea or something like that.

My WBO2 sensors are all handmedowns from friends but I prefer the AEM WBO2 setup over the Innovate LC1.
Both are configurable to show lamba or A/F ratios as well as an output signal you can send into a datalogging device.


Oil Pressure = I use an Autometer gauge and honestly, I'm not in love with it and I've had to replace the sender once already despite not using this car that much (one race and one track day a year). If it breaks again, I'll probably replace it with another AuberINS SYL2813 and a
http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_ … cts_id=149
or
http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_ … cts_id=315

Myopic Motorsport's #888 Ceci n'est pas une Citron Thunderbird ("This is not a lemon" but a 1995 tbird w/ 93 V8 swap + shopping cart rear wing + engine mounted frito maker)
2017 Sears Pointless Organizer’s Choice
Frito Making Tbird from 2018 Sears Pointless Engine Heat BBQ - http://goo.gl/csaet4