i know i need a boost gauge and a better water temp gauge... had planned on an oil temp gauge too... but what else do i really need for my daily driver? can the DEFI BF series gauges be run without the link? i like the idea of the two warning lights better than the D series with just the red arrow

 

Depending on your mods, I'd go with oil and fuel pressure too. If you're stock, you can skip out on the fuel.

Personally, if it's done well, I want to know as much info as I can about what my car is doing. I have boost, h20 temp and oil press. I will have fuel press, oil temp and egt soon.

 

air fuel ratio is a good guage to have! I think the two most important guages are boost and water temp.

 

the only thing that bothers me about getting an A/F gauge ( i know that is useful) is that i can't find a DEFI BF series one and i think it will bother me alot to have different looking gauges all around my interior. i have my eyes on oil pressure, fuel pressure, and EGT later... but for now... is the three that i'm looking at ok? am i being stupid to want the warning lights? should i just go with the stand alone D series gauges and just pay attention to them vs. relying on dummy lights?

 

This guage is absolutely useless you have this attached to a wide band O2. Don't waist your money.

 

The EGT is also useless, IMO, becasue of the different readings you get depending on mounting points.

From what I have read there is no real consistant verdict on what is a "safe" reading and what is "unsafe".

Your choice of guages should go in this order.

Boost
Water
Fuel Preasure
Oil Temp
Oil Preasure
Intake Air Temperature

 

I have the Defi BF boost, egt, oil temp, fuel pressure and water temp and you can't use any of the gauges without the link unit II. My next gauge will be the oil pressure since my stock one doesn't work well. I strongly suggest getting the boost, and water temp. You can skip on the other gauges, however, it's always a good idea to monitor your car condition with the other gauges.

 

I just got the DEFI A/F and boost gauge setup with the double pod mount , and it looks really good. it matches with your stock tach and speedo gauge. Looks real good all together i think...and just a question i have...i got another oil gauge also and it reads like 100 psi of pressure when im not even running the car hard...like i can go to 3 or 4 thousand rpm and it will go to like 100...is that normal or bad or what ..i confused?

 

Not to say I know how to read it (because I don't haha) but the gauges are only as effective as your ability to read them. If you can't tell what is good or bad, they're kinda useless...so good question man. I wanna know this too...

 

Use a marking pen in green and red to mark safe and unsafe ranges for each type of gauge. This way, at glance you can see were you are relative to your limits. Doesn't the FC Commander let you display these numbers anyway?

 

Pivot makes a fan controller that has a digital water temp AND oil temp display all for the meager price of 150... I have that and it's great! Tested it next to another oil temp and water temp guage that I rigged real quick for comparison and it's dead on. I reccomend the fan controller to anyone... plus it has the cool (and appearantly primary) feature of lowering the temp at which your radiator fans come on. go buy it!

-the president of Pivot :-P

 

oh.. did I mention warning lights and sounds for both oil and water temps too? oOoo... ^_^

 

I disagree. I had several tuners, including the ones that built my car, recommend EGT. I'm not disagreeing that you get different readings pending where the sensor is mounted, this is probably true. However, one of the more respected tuners in the country installed mine and tuned it. As well as the gauge was recommended by several shops.

My understanding is the gauge is more useful to tuners than everyday blokes like myself. However, I drive my FD daily, and regardless of where the EGT is mounted I can trend it's pattern daily to how vigorously I am driving the car. If something is out of whack, it can help me diagnose it.

To each their own. I guess one could make an argument that oil temp would be related to engine temp. Why would the "daily driver" (not racer) want both?

 

boost/water

 

The point of using EGT is not so much to compare your readings to someone else's or to some "standard," but to compare yours to yourself under different conditions. Yes, the closer the thermocouple is to the exhaust ports, the hotter it will be, and whether you have a plain steel or ceramic coated downpipe and whether you've ported or not will make a difference. What you will see is a lower temp when the A/F is rich, and a higher temp when the A/F is at stoichiometric or (for safety's sake) slightly rich. If you start to go lean (hotter thinner intake air, fuel pump malflunction, injectors getting clogged, fuel starvation on the banked corners, etc.) your EGT shoots up. The best way to set this up is to have the EGT in place when you tune with a wide-band O2 sensor on a dyno, so you know what YOUR EGT should be, and anything above that is TROUBLE! The only other way I know of is trial and error with your fuel mapping, which can get very expensive. I would recommend if you can't do the former, an EGT won't be much help.

 

Thank you but I will stick to the more user friendly WB O2 sensor to read my A/F ratio.

The thing that no one has mentioned about the EGT temp gauge is that people who track their car and have one often see it pegged at its maximum reading.

For those of you who want one, great, but there are a lot of other more important things that you can be monitoring.