Alright. I'll get those numbers as soon as I can.

02stangt: I think it's just on the '93s, but Mine is 100 at the bottom, then there are lines at 40 degree intervals up to 260.

 

Okay. Thought it was odd you were giving a temperature lower than 160 based on the gauge.

 

Yeah, I only found this out because I was looking at googled pictures of different year gauges. Not the most commonly knowninfo, lol.

 

Update:

Head Gasket. Not 100% certain yet, but using my mathematical skills I've made this equation: white smoke+sweet smell+loss of literally all of my coolant over a three day period=head gasket.

The reason I'm not certain though, is that there has been puddling under the car overnight, which means it could be a leak. Or both.

 

Okay, so we took the car in for a head gasket test, and everythign looks good (thank god!!!). But that still doesn't explain how I lost so much coolant over such a short period of time. And it also doesn't explain how it doesn't seem to be going away anymore. My new guess is that there's a leak somewhere that only makes itself known under certain circumstances.

Anybody have any ideas?

 

If it's not a head gasket, start looking for coolant dripping down something, you're guess is as good as ours anymore...

 

Mkay.

I'm taking it in on monday to have the true temperature checked, and to tell if it's the sending unit or gauge. I'll have them do a coolant system pressure check as well. That'll show any leaks. :P

 

Alrighty!

Well, I took it in and they first hooked the car up to a scanner, to see what temperature the car thought it was at. According to the scanner, it was essentially at the correct operating temp. It read 190, but that's about right since it was sitting for ten minutes after running for 30. Anyway. This confirmed that the gauge (or sending unit) was bad. But before we unplugged the scanner and I got on my way, I noticed that the rpms on the scanner were off by a fair margin (200 at idle, and close to 700 around 2300 (tach)rpms). This was odd to me, and extremely odd to the mechanic, since he'd never seen a tach differing froma scanner. At this point, we didn't know what to trust so we got the infrared thermostat out and according to it, my gauge (andthus sending unit) were both right. The thermostat read about 150, spot on with the gauge. So now we're pretty certain the thermostat is stuck open, and it'll just take a new one to fix the problem.

One question that this raises, is what damage could have been caused by running around at 130-150 degrees all the time?Hopefully none, but it seems to me that if the engine is meant to run at 180ish, then being off by 30-50 degrees is a bad thing. (It is in terms of excess heat, so my guess is it works both ways).

 

I wouldn't think that it would hurt anything (although some of the older car vets can correct me if I'm wrong...), but most people fight to run their engine cooler so they can run more compression. That said, since the motor was designed to run hotter than that, you were probably just not running it in it's optimal operating temp, so it wasn't as efficient as it could have been running.

 

Yeah, our mechanic told me that odds are it hasn't done any damage, though he can't be sure without tearing her down. But the second or third thing he said was that I've been dumping a lot more gas than neccessary. Well, not using it all anyway. haha