Friday, Jul 13, 2007 at 12:45
Hi Motherhen,
I had the EGT, Trans Temp and Boost gauges fitted by Wally at Top End Audio in Wangarra. They were recommended to me by my exhaust guy and I saw some of his work in performance cars and it is top quality. Having said that you do pay for it as the gauges I had installed were not off the shelf ones.
The make is Revolution custom electronic gauges and you can design them how you like. You can get different coloured bezels, faces, lighting etc, etc. I had them make mine with similar design to the original instrument panel with black faces, green numbers, and red needles and when they illuminate they look very similar to the F250 dash.
I had chrome bezels and he designed a mount for the dash to hold the gauges, the back of the gauges go into that small pocket on the dash, so that the background matched the rest of the F250 dash layout. They come with alarms that you can set to whatever temperature you want and a red light comes on when it reaches that set alarm temp.
I went one step further and had the word FORD in the oval emblem embossed on the face of the gauges to make it look original.
As you know you don't have to go this far as these gauges are very expensive
EGT $360, Trans Temp $270, Boost $360, all up with fitting and facia plate etc $1678.
As these gauges come from the US they came in Farenheit which was my mistake as I assumed they would be in celcius coming to Oz so therefore I had to convert all the readings that Ford give in celcius to farenheit to set the alarms and believe me it is hard to think in farenheit after dealing in celcius for so long.
I have since had Wally order new faces in celcius for me of which he changed over just two weeks ago.
Another thing to decide if you are going to get a EGT gauge installed is where you put the sender. There are two trains of thought on this, pre turbo or post turbo. If you go pre turbo you have to drill into the manifold which I was not to keen on as if it is not done right when you drill, eg vacuum filings or put grease on drill bit you can end up with filing going through the turbo fins and not doing much good.
I went for post turbo and had the sender drill into the new larger dump pipe that I had installed. The temperature difference between the two can be 200C eg pre turbo 720C post turbo 520C so as long as you know this and set the alarm accordingly, no problems.
Now on the larger gear box sump been there done that.
My original plan was to install an extra transmission cooler together with the larger sump pan that you can get from the US, these can range from $550 to $900 in price. The only reason I was going to go for the larger sump pan was that the original pan is made of aluminium where as the aftermaket one was made of alloy and ribbed for cooling, but it had a port already in it for a tranny temp sender unit, whereas I thought drilling the flimsy original pan might not be a good idea.
I since found out from the Powerstroke shop with pictures where you can install a sender unit into the original pan without drilling, it is in a testing port or something like that on the side, you just unscew the plug and screw in the sender making sure that it is the right length sender so that it does not protrude into the oil flow area but is flush with it.
Having done this I went for just having the extra tranny cooler fitted for $506 by Baily's Auto Transmissions in Balcatta, they are also a Ford warranty dealer and does a lot of aftermarket work on F250's.
Some have gone for replacing the original tranny cooler with a larger one from F350's but I thought the idea of having two would be better, if one fails for some reason it hopfully will still work or if one gets holed then you could block that one of and bypass it using the one to get out of trouble.
Sorry for the long winded answer but there's not much to do out in the desert at night time, keeps my mind active and hope it help in your decision.
Cheers
Stewart
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