well, second only to a new coolant pressure cap, I've come to the conclusion that the most important mod or upgrade you can do to your PSD is a coolant pressure gauge.

a. if you have calvitation and coolant leaking into your crankcase the guage will exhibit low pressure and no pressure at idle...and will not hold PSI when the engine is off..

b. if you have an egr leak the gauge will exhibit low pressure and no pressure at idle...and will not hold PSI when the engine is off..

c. if one of those snap rings comes loose and you get an oring coolant leak the guage will exhibit low pressure and no pressure at idle...and will not hold PSI when the engine is off..

d. if you blow a head gasket the gauge will peg out.

 

Intresting!

Subscribed. Thanx Fritz

 

Recommendations for a gage?

 

picked this one up at auto zone. they also had a 6ft nylon hose kit. I had a T fitting laying arond. pulled the hose off the degas bottle.....added a 4" hose and clamp to the deguase hose connection...connected the T fitting to the 4" hose clamping on both sides....ran the original hose that originally went to the deguas bottle to one of the T fitting connectors.....used the remaining connector to connect the nylon line that runs thru the firewall and to the guage. The guage is temp mounted using a nylon t-wrap.....need to find a perm mounting solution.


why did I do this?


I was drving down the road and pulled into a coffe shop. I noticed a liguid dripping to the ground....pop the hood and one of the c-clamps for the cooling systemp had slipped and the hose popped out. I loss 2 of the 7 gallons of coolant. water temp guage gave no clues. system was basically at 0 PSI. fixed the clamp and hose, added the correct fludi and mix.

on the way home I was wondering what would be more informative than just the water temp guage. had I not stopped for coffe and notcied the leak...I could have blown a head gasket and even ruuined a water pump.

found some old threads about the pros of using a coolant PSI guage. hooked it up and did some testing and basically had I had this guage...I would have saw an immediate drop to zero PSI once the hose popped.

I think I sank 30 bucks into this setup. The PSI guage is a 0 to 16 PSI fel guage, but works fine for coolant. The guage must have been old stock since it was only 14 bucks. hose kit another 15 bucks. 30 minutes to install.

 

Doing it, but you would have to do it on the radiator side of coolant, correct?

Denny

 

I put mine right off the degas bottle using the small diameter hose connection using a t-fitting...., . the cooling system in a 6.X is a closed system and is pressurized under normal operating conditions.....loss of pressure from pump housing, leaking lines, egr, oil cooler, or excess pressure due to head gasket leak will immediately be reflected on the coolant PSI gauge even though at the same time the water temp gauge will show normal until almost all the coolant is loss.

 

I like this idea......good catch. Glad your truck is okay!

Im adding this to something to do to my truck someday. Wonder if there is a way you could do this (more expensive) to have a setup off a sending unit for pressure to keep a line full of coolant from being in the cab....

 

I'm sure there is and it probably be more accurate but you'll need a tuner type box with free sensor ports to plug it in.

the line I'm using is probably 3/16's of an inch...it looks the size of a pen ink stem.

 

so I bought a corner dash gauge mount and a steering colum gauge mount. tried them both and decided on a steering colum version which I could still use if I ever get one of those 3 guage vertical ones that mount on the left side of the windshield / roof support.

either one would look oem.