k, my oil pressure light flickers on and off. at idle the needle sits at about 0. checked the oil and its full. also when the oil pressure gauge goes by 0 it idle drops almost to the point where it wants to stall, any ideas?

 

either your oil pump is weak, your oil galleries are plugged, or you have a faulty sensor, would be my ideas. Easiest to check is sending unit.

 

check your oil pressure sensor and the connector between it and the wiring harness in the engine bay, make sure everything is clean and working correctly. if this doesn't change things (and it doesn't sound like it will), i'd tend to agree with Bajama. best recommendation is to get it to a rotary specialist and see what they think. there's only so much accuracy to a diagnosis-via-internet.

the FSM will tell you how to test the oil pressure sensor with a mulitmeter (pretty sure that's what this one was). the sensor itself is located below the oil filter on the driver's side of the engine, just incase you didn't know that.

i only say to check the sensor and stuff because on my 944, i had this same issue but it was the sensor, not the pump, and at idle, when i got a really low oil pressure reading (needle pegged to bottom, not just at zero), the engine would dip and sound like it was going to die... it was something funny with the ECU. i don't know if a similar type of thing can happen with the FDs or not.

 

FSM says 50 psi at 3k rpm and if you get that, I doubt it's the pump. Senders go bad, but on mine it was just the connection at the sender. I had the same symtom, with psi reading zero at operating temp during idle. I was ready to spring for a $100 + sender but when I looked at MAZDA's connector it seemed pretty cheezy and wasn't really tight. It was also a little dirty from driping oil from the filter pedestal. When I cleaned it I immediately saw indicated pressure at idle. Then I changed out the connector with a good one and wrapped it with some fusion tape to keep it clean. No issues since.