gbhrps
Well-known member
I've had my newly restored 55 for 6 years now and I've always watched that temperature gauge like a hawk when summer arrived. Normally the needle stood straight up, but sitting in traffic, particularly on those days when the outside temperature was in the 90's, I watched it climb all the way to where it would bury itself right off the scale. I searched these and other archives looking for the answer to keeping the temperature down so that I wouldn't hurt the engine, and I came across an item that solved my problem .... because I didn't have a problem in the first place. I installed a totally separate temperature gauge system in the car that took all of 30 minutes to install with NO MODIFICATIONS to the car whatsoever. It showed that my particular gauge was reading far too high, and that for most driving situations my car's real engine temperature was entirely within the normal range and was never near the boiling point. The unit uses a single AAA battery, has a digital readout from -40 to +300F (can be switched to read in Celcius as well), measures 1 inch X 1 inch X 3 inches, with a thin 10 foot wired lead that has a small probe on its end, and costs $26 USD to buy. Its a Taylor 9940 Thermometer that can be purchased from Graingers Industrial Supply as their item 5XL18, or from many other places online. I simply pushed the probe out through the firewall grommet that the radio antenna uses on my car, and ran the wire under the heater hoses to the top radiator hose at the rad. Here I undid the top radiator hose clamp (after draining a half gallon of coolant from the car), slipped the hose off the rad connection, fed the temperature probe just into the opening, and pushed the rad hose over the wire and the rad hose connection to the radiator and tightened the clamp. The wire is so thin that really tightening up the clamp prevented any leaking. From there it was a simple matter to use black wire ties to secure the lead wire under the coolant hoses out of sight all the way back to the firewall. Inside the car and under the dash I again tied the wire up out of sight, and simply laid the digital readout on the transmission hump for easy reading. I suspect that it would be very easy to just lay the entire unit up on the lower inside edge of the dash when you wanted it out of sight, or it could be hinged in some way to be viewed when necessary and then pushed out of sight. The beauty of this unit is its low cost, the fact that you don't have to make any changes to the car, and the fact that to remove it for a show won't take but 5 minutes. I was so impressed with the ease of installing the unit that I bought a second one for one of my other cars that I suspected had a less than accurate temperature gauge. The whole exercise sure eased my concerns about my overheating problem. I really didn't have one afterall.
