Van stuff

The 2.1 motor has some really sensitive oil pressure issues so, after a situation the other day that necessitated I pull over and turn off the key and make sure that nothing catastrophic had occured, I decided to install a gauge today. Like normal, I ordered it from Van Cafe (you can see the snackies). Installation was pretty straight forward. Kind of a pain to run the wires since the one leading from the sending unit to the gauge needs to go so far but not too bad. Here's everything before I started.....sans coffee.



This is hwat it's supposed to look like but I found that there were some issues with the double pole sending unit. It seems to less sensitive than the stock VW low pressure sending unit and I was having the idiot light come on at idle after the motor was hot. To get around this I ditched the elbow and installed a T and used the stock VW sending unti for the idiot light and then only used 1 pole to run the new electric gauge. So far so good.


The dash in the van is so nice. It's actually a metal dash so even though it's 20 years old, there's nerry a crack in it. I couldn't bear to drill a hole in it but this was the best place I could find to mount the gauge. This motor produces some silly low oil pressure. At hot idle it produces about 3-5 psi and at 2000 rpm's it produces about 17 psi. My 2001 Jeep Cherokee produces 40psi at a hot idle. I love my van.