In another short installment, I managed to take a moment to install my newly received temperature gauge on Truckstang. Unfortunately, the stock gauge did not seem to want to work, whether because of the sending unit or the gauge itself being defunct. I can only imagine even if the sending unit was faulty, the gauge should've done something, but it did not. I made sure to get a gauge that came with an electrical sending unit, versus the mechanical unit that tends to be more commonplace in these universal gauges. While I've had good luck with these, the only problem is having to route the metal probe/cable around and through to the top of the engine where the probe itself would be secured in place. With the electrical sending unit, I only have to worry about routing another single wire through to the engine bay.
Since the stock sending unit was right under the HEI distributor, it would've been a little more difficult to remove the thing without possibly disrupting the distributor somehow. Luckily, I had another port on the intake where I removed an old emissions related manifold fitting, leaving a 3/8" NPT opening available. With a reducer bushing, I was able to secure the sending unit in place, just across from the stock sending unit. I had to add a little extra wire to the length of wire that I secured for the run from the gauge. I took time to route the wire along the same path as the existing wiring, zip tying everything in place to keep things nice and neat. Even after passing through the firewall, I continued to follow the wiring over to the engine, needing to add only a few inches extra. Heat shrink tubing helped cover the couple solder joints I did have to do. In the cab area, I had to add another single gauge mount bracket, since the triple bracket was fully occupied. While I could've stuck with the USB charger that had the voltmeter in place for my means of measuring system voltage, I wanted the dedicated voltmeter in place that I can use. I had a couple single gauge mount brackets in stock so this was no big deal and I had the new gauge mounted right next to the triple gauge bracket. I tapped into the existing wiring from the triple gauge, connecting ring terminals to the terminals on the voltmeter gauge to get power to the new gauge. With that, the temp gauge is ready to go, once I get everything back together with the transmission. Hopefully once I rebuild the thing and get it back in the car, we will be on the road testing the car since that's the only thing standing in the way of getting the car on the road. Other than verifying the driveshaft is straight, we are about ready to go.
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