My car feels much better now

Turing machine lol!

Does anyone know what's going on here? A car without a temp guage? Surely not! Are you suggesting it's got a simple warning light telltale instead of a guage?

Peter - RTFM

Yes. You'll have an overheat warning lamp instead.

There's probably nothing wrong with it...

Okay but they're separated by a wall of metal - heat transfer between the two will depend on the thickness and type of the metal, and the speed of the water passing through the cooling system.

The oil lives in a slightly pressurised (thought the oil itself is measures pressure whilst being pumped) environment and is generally thrashed around with a lot of "air" volume. The coolant lives in a contiguous environment under higher pressure within the containment vessels.

From that I'd expect coolant temperature peaks and troughs to be smoother, and oil temperature transients to be more pronounced (under strain) - but that's just gut instinct ;-)

Inefficient cooling can affect the matter / antimatter intermix, especially on Fiat systems that use the notoriously marginal Mk3 tokomak. When the antimatter mix becomes unstable, the containment field reduce thereby threatening a possible warp core overload. Sporadic electrical insulation breaks (spark plug leads for instance) can make this worse, by not burning the antimatter completely, leaving a slight but building antimatter residue within the combustion chamber.

Is that a bit like the terrible rash I got after treating Kermit's fuel system with a special "fuel rod" I bought off some chap from Russia using eBay?

Terrible rash on my skin after that, heh.

Yup. A light that comes on just after you've cooked the engine. They're cheap for a reason.

John

Peter wrote on 24 Jun 2004 00:31:49 -0700:

Given that you claim never to have driven it long enough for it to get properly warmed up, and you've apparantly never exceeded 40mph, I doubt there is anything wrong with it.

Yay!

You're _still_ at uni? I got off for summer last week (and that was late, at least for Scottish uni's). Then, of course, I broke my foot on Tuesday night... So no driving for me for 6 weeks :((

In some cases, that is, like older Peugeot / Citroens. In others, it comes on with enough timing...

To be fair, given that the vast majority of people don't look at their coolant gauges enough to notice when it overheats, a lamp makes more sense to more people. And modern coolant temperature gauges show you what the ECU reports is the temperature (i.e. cold, normal, overheating) so there's not much difference.

F*ck it - gAUge not guage...

Exactly! You're suffering from RadWeld my friend - you can get a special tonic from Halfords to rub on it...

The message from "DocDelete" contains these words:

Neighbour's Citroen AX ain't got a temp gauge - just a panic light which is ORed from the oil pressure, temperature and god knows what else.

In message , Guy King writes

Ford Ka is the same.

It's just for temperature on the Ka...

In message , DervMan writes

That's what I was referring to. Guy said the AX didn't have a temp gauge, I said same with the Ka.

Heh, sorry, my bad. I thought you'd said the Ka had a "generic panic red light" type thing...

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Douglas Payne" saying something like:

Nah, in the NewTown league Cumbernauld is the epitome of grimness, imo. Even Livingston is nicer; but for old towns Motherwell would take some beating, I agree.

Paging sirTony!

Derv, I always thought you had quite rational thoughts, but buying a "fuel rod" of a random Russian bloke on eBay????

Are you off your rocker? :-)

Peter

That'd be "gauge" then.

A fair few cars have them - mate of mine at uni once had a Punto (R reg) that didn't have a temp gauge, ended up needing a new engine as a result of overheating (I'm guessing it was cheaper to stick a replacement lump in maybe).

My Fiesta van (1.8TDi) didn't have a temp gauge, just a light, and when a crack formed in the oil cooler, bunging up the cooling system with brown goo, all I got was a "it's now too hot" light, basically saying it's too late. If it had a temp gauge I'd have known at the earliest opportunity, and may well have been able to save it.

Peter