Had a fair bit of discussion with Steptoe during the build up and fitment of my low oil warning light and he'd said that an Oil temperature guage would be a handy item to have as well / instead. So, while I was in there messing about with the sumps, I also fitted up a temperature guage sender (which Geoff spotted in those pics BTW) in the sump.
Originally the plan was to simply drill the oil filler plug and stick the sender in it, but I was a bit dubious of the thickness of the material left, and didn't want to end up snapping the oil drain bolt through it being weakened by my modification. Subsequently, I had my old, spare, half rounded bolt laying there so I went through that routine afterwards just to see how well it shaped up.
^ Ok, first I went looking around under the bike to find a handy spot away from moving bits of the stands etc and the exhausts.
^ Then I got the bits ready for surgery. Note the nut I tapped to match the sender thread.
^ I selected this area as it was nice and flat nestled in between two ribs
^ Tools of choice
^ A common problem with taps is that they're too short to get any swing on them if in a limited space.
^ My way around this problem was to fit a 3/8th extension with a 1/4" adapter which fitted the tap.
^ This way, I could get a full rotation of the tap.
^ After cleaning out all the swarf, the sender got screwed in place
^ A healthy dab of loctite to be sure, to be sure
Then on went the fibre washer and locknut.
^ the finished sump.
^ And mounted, with the wiring following the ignition pickup loom up towards the battery area.
^ Mounted the gauge ($12 Ebay) in its little pod mount ($4.90 Ebay) and did a simple wiring run down to my relays hiding under the tank. Found one of my switched active wires and went from there.
^ I simply hard wired the gauge light to the power as I couldn't be bothered getting into the headlight to find a lighting power wire. There's minimal drain from the tiny bulb anyway.
Tomorrow, I'll take it for a run to see how it all works.......................................
I'll keep you posted.
Oh and before I forget, here's how the oil drain bolt went.
^ Drilled the centre of the bolt out
^ How much of the head end's left
^ Then tapped the thread into it.
^ A lot more beef left that I anticipated.
^ The sender loosely screwed into the bolt to show the size differences.
After going through the process, there is enough thickness of the bolt to fit a sender in it. I do have my reservations, as the sender doesn't protrude right through the bolt which would give very limited surface exposure to get a proper reading. Also, unless you were using the 6 sided spanner as provided by Yamaha in the toolkit, You'd probably have problems getting the drain plug undone with the sender sticking out of the middle of it. And finally, finding somewhere to run the wiring keeping away from the exhausts and such would be a much greater problem than with the rear mount sender. The only + is that it can be fitted without removing the sump.
