Oil Temp Guages

cooltouch · Post by **cooltouch** » Fri Jun 04, 2010 10:57 am

I have a '76 R90/6 that has a VDO oil temp gauge that a previous owner installed. It sits in a pod that is mounted via a bracket to the top fork triple tree plate. It operates off a sending unit that is installed at the back of the deep front section of the oil pan. Because the oil pan has a sort of stair-step profile, where the sender sits is out of the way from getting hit by anything or the sender's wire getting snagged.

If you wanted to install something like this, drilling and tapping the hole for the sender is easy enough to do, but you'd have to pull the oil pan, which isn't really that big of a deal, either.

The nice thing about having a gauge that is mounted up by the handlebars is that you don't really have to take your eyes off the road, whereas with a dipstick gauge, you're having to look down around your ankle, and you don't even have the road ahead in your peripheral vision.

I live in Houston, TX, and it gets hot down here during the summer. So, having an oil temp gauge is something I consider very helpful.

schrader7032 · Post by **schrader7032** » Fri Jun 04, 2010 6:12 pm

Just curious...has your VDO gage told you anything that's been good to find out? Mostly I hear people say that it doesn't change much and they end up not looking at it anymore.

cooltouch · Post by **cooltouch** » Sun Jun 06, 2010 2:33 pm

Actually I pay pretty close attention to it. A friend of mine who's an old airhead hand told me that it wasn't worth bothering with, and then I wound up in a ride recently following him on his new (to him) R1100RT on the Interstate and was having trouble keeping up. Doing 90-95mph at some points, and the oil temp had gotten up to around 280F. Usually on a hot day it rarely gets hotter than 250F. Shouldn't have tried keeping up with him, cuz I think I ended up breaking something in the motor. The bike lost power after about 20 minutes of this high speed chase, and is now pretty gutless above 75mph in 5th. Compression's way down. I tell myself now that I shouldn't have listened to him, and should have paid attention to the oil temp instead. Live and learn, I suppose.

By the way, back on topic, I found a place that sells the dipstick oil temp gauges (scroll down almost all the way to the bottom):

http://www.bmwhucky.com/010011.html

$68 -- not all that cheap, but cheaper than my setup, I'm sure. BTW, Hucky's looks to be a good site for finding vintage Beemer parts in general.