29-12-2020, 11:09 AM
(This post was last modified: 29-12-2020, 11:22 AM by Chris Garner.)
(28-12-2020, 07:08 PM)John Cornforth Wrote: I spent my university days in north Wales. A friend had an enthusiastically driven tuned mini, and was always fretting about the reading on the oil pressure gauge. On the narrow roads lined with stone walls, it was a bit nerve wracking for me as a passenger when his eyes were off the road. I found the solution one day by raiding the first aid kit and sticking an elastoplast over the b...y thing ! Moral - gauges aren't always a blessing.
" Oil pressure at two thousand, hot, is forty pounds or so,
" And if it is not forty pounds, your motor will not go."
Thus spake the learned makers in their clover little book,
And so, at that small instrument, I seldom dare to look.
Sometimes on biting winter morn, when bitter frost abides,
The needle crawls to a shaky ten, then sleepily subsides;
Oh clueless clot though I may be, is not the car a hero,
Have we not gone ten thousand miles, oil pressure, hot, at zero.?
W.H.Charnock 1951
...alternatively Fougasse and McCullough in their 1935 " Complete Guide to the Road " state:
The Oil Gauge is a little clock with " Pounds per square inch " on its face. It has only one hand, which moons vaguely about. A sudden return to zero can mean a hundred different things to the expert, but never more than one to the beginner, who won't have noticed anything anyway.