At 01:52 PM 6/2/99 +1000, Neil Cotty wrote:
>....
>To the temp guage - the day my A overheated, the temp guage crapped out -
due to the heater wire coming loose and bonding itself to the sender cable,
it seems to have somehow fried the guage. This is a dual oil pressure/water
temp guage and the oil pressure still works but the water temp does not.
The temp gauge is actually a pressure gauge internally, quite similar to
the oil pressure gauge. It works on the vapor pressure of a volitil fluid
inside the sensor bulb at the cylinder head, connected to the gauge with a
small pipette shrouded inside that spiral wrap wire. When the little pipe
springs a leak from a crack or a break or a kink (or maybe by getting fried
by a shorted heater wire) it looses the fluid and the temp gauge stops
working. The cure is to have the pipette replaced, new tube soldered in
place with fresh fluid inside, nice tricky little job best left to the
experts (especially if you don't fancy being asphixiated). Such shops will
often quote $80 to $120 to recondition the whole instrument. I have yet to
find a shop that will give a decent quote to just replace the pipette and
the fluid without opening the instrument case (unless you figure that the
tablespoon full of fluid is worth about $50).
>.... My heater now works, but appears to be useless until after about 1/2
hour, even then it's useless over 50mph! Oh well... :)
This sounds like your thermostat is stuck wide open (or missing). Try
installing a new thermostat, maybe even before blaming the temperature
gauge for your woes. Let us know how it all comes out.
Regards,
Barney Gaylord
1958 MGA with an attitude
http://www.ntsource.com/~barneymg
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