Thread: Mechanical vs Electric

I perfer mechanical due to ease of installation, cost and that more types of guages come in mechanical IMO. As far as the oil pressure guage is concerned, you should NEVER use the nylon tubing that comes with it. Spend the 10 or so bucks and get the copper tubing. If you do it right, you will never have any problems.

For the most part all of you are making this more complicated than it has to be.

Unless you have a dedicated race car most people don't need gauges to tell them precise values, you just need to know if **** is ****ed up or not.

You either have pressure or you don't, if you don't stop the car.
it doesn't matter if you have 45psi or 49psi

Same with temp, if you go outside of a normal range, bad if you are hitting 200F or 205F it doesn't make much difference

Get the gauges you like from a respectable company

anyone who's car is not stock and actually cares about the car is going to want some precision. Its a little bit more than the difference between 45 and 49psi. Not to mention that electric oil pressure gauges fail constantly. Ill be damned if I want to shut my car off and have it towed every time my electric oil pressure sender fails. How do I know if it lost oil pressure or the sensor failed?

GTi-Rs have a stock oil temp, water temp, boost vac/pressure, and oil pressure gauge... for the record.

Also for the record I run mechanical gauges (except my wideband A/F gauge) and have a SS braided line on my oil pressure gauge. I was just asking the question to hear opinions and gather information for people in the future. I've had electrical gauges before, and I have seen them go wacked after some grounding problems.

I have mechanical gauges on my car. I don't like the hassle of having to wire them us and installing the sensors with proper grounding. Sure, mechanical oil pressure brings oil inside the car, but I upped for the stainless line which will not fail like the plastic one given.

so it was an install problem not a guage problem...hmmm

well i guess there you have it, all electric oil pressure gauges fail and the only sensible solution is to do what you are doing...i wonder why the makers of all these gauges don't see the error of their ways

I had a bad experience with a Mechanical gauge. The tubed poped off while warming the car up in the garage (thank God I found the leak before I left). I use electric and I haven't had any issues so far. I've noticed a 2-3 psi difference between the mechanical and electric one.

Umm, no it was an electrical problem. The gauge was installed correctly, the car had a grounding problem once and it messed with the gauge, just one of the problems, if unlikely to happen, with electrical gauges. Electrical components are fragile under the correct circumstances.

I run both, two mech and two electric, and i think they both work great, my buddy works at a dealership and i wanted to compare what his super dooper dealer scanner saw my water temp at, and they matched exactly (electric gauge). Electrical gauges are just as good as mechanical and are good for us people who are paranoid about getting our interior dirty. you just have to know how to wire things up, just depends on personal preference of the user