Hi,
Everyone seems to be on about keeping an eye on the temps that thier cars run. Fair enough. How and where are you guys taking these readings?
[and no prize for saying "With a thermometer" :-)]

Andy.

ofcourse with a thermometer.

a digital onboard temp gauge like the ones made by MIP.($40)

or via an infared hand held device that actually shoots a laser at the engine and you get a reading from there. like the ones made by Raytek.($75?)

look em both up on ebay or yahoo.

yep i picked up a cheep one on ebay then got work to buy me a expensive one and temps were the same ...but get one your engines will last longer

I use a radio shack handheld IR thermometer.Does anybody else use one of these?Can someone tell me how accurate these are?

yOU CAN TEST ACCURACY BY BOILING WATER.
FIND OUT WHAT TEMP WATER BOILS AT YOUR ELEVATION
AND HIT IT WITH YOUR TEMP GUN. IT MAY BE OFF A TENTH
OR TWO...
oops sorry about laa caps. didnt realize...

And are the temps that people are generally quoting on here celcius or farenheit as I know alot are US based....

Most people say around 260 F

Allright here we go.

I am addicted to temp probes. I mainly use 1) Temperature 2) Sound 3) performance (in order of importance) to tune an engine.

I use a $35 infrared probe like the raytek. Most are these are accurate to +-1 degree and for our purpose it doesnt matter really!

Cheap <150 engines.. you wanna run em at around 195 during break in and about 250 for normal running.

High end $300+ engines ebreak in at around 225 and they run anywhere between 275 and 350 easy!
On top of that they last twice as long!
Can you say "Get what you pay for"?!

-ram

Where are people generally taking the temp readings from and under what conditions?

if you go with an MIP, you should loop the thermistor around the lowest possible cut in your heatsink/head. That is, you want the sensor to be as close to the engine block as possible. This works better with some heads than others (for example, it works fine on an O'Donnell head, but its sometimes a problem on the OS heads).

With a temp gun (I use a raytek) you bring the car to a stop, then point the gun down the top of the head so it is reading from the top of the glow plug, then pull the trigger to get the temp. Its important with temp guns to make sure that you have the lens of the gun as close as possible to the top of the cylinder head, and its equally important to point the gun straight down on top of the glow plug.

On this board you will typically find people talking in terms of Farenheit, although the raytek (and some others too) has the ability to switch between F and C.

Most people suggest running in the 260 F range. Thats just a general engine health guideline. Generally I tune for power, then make sure that the temps are in an acceptable range. Temp alone doesn't mean your engine is tuned, but an excessively high temp will almost gurantee an early death for your engine.