My oil pressure sender "removal kit"

[cubby911T]

Hi guys. I just wanted to share my experience on this PITA exercise. After searching and reading lots of threads about removing the oil pressure sender, I decided to follow the advice outlined many, many times by Jim Sims and John Walker....that being to remove the sender and its mounting block together and then separate the sender from the block at the workbench.

Boy am I ever glad I did it this way. The amount of torque it took to separate the sender from the block would surely have damaged the threads in my engine case. As you can see from my little "kit" picture above, I had to employ the services of my impact wrench to get that sucker free. I do not have an open ended wrench large enough for the sender's hex head, but I do have a 24mm impact socket, sooooooo.........I decided to use a hack saw to cut off the top part of the sender which exposed the hex head "plug" on the sender for socket access. At first I tried my socket with a breaker bar, but without a proper vice on my workbench, I had to use my Workmate 2000 to hold the block and it kept wanting to wriggle free when applying torque with the breaker bar. So I put the impact wrench on it and after a good 10-second burst the plug finally yielded.

You'll also notice in the pics above that I had to remove the entire oil line to allow the hollow bolt to come out. For some reason, I could not separate the joint in the oil line just to the right of the sender block. It's like it is frozen there and I didn't want to force it, so I just left it joined and removed the whole line instead:





I have not installed the new sender yet, but I expect it will be much easier than removing the old one. By the way, the engine is an '87 3.2. I wouldn't be surprised if this sender is the original unit.

I hope this info gives pause to folks considering the "crow's foot" method (removing the sender without removing the sender block from the engine) and illustrates that Jim and John's method is the way to go.

[Jagshund]

Thanks for the clarification, I'm certain you're going to save someone faced with the same issue a bit of money down the road. Besides that, your thread has given me a brief respite from the "57T" saga . . .