So the oil light on my 89 crx is acting weird. Some days it will not go on at all and others it will go on right away. I am thinking it might be my oil pump but the oil light behavior isn't consistent. If the light goes on, then I turn my car off and turn it right back on it will stay off. I figure it should go back on if the pressure is low. Please help! Let me know if you need any more info.

Thanks guys!

 

Are you low on oil? If you are accelerating hard, the oil will sling to the backside of you pan, and not go into the pickup, leading to low oil pressure.

 

That shouldn't really happen ever.

The best thing to do is go down to a parts store get a mechanical oil pressure gauge. Get a cheap one there not expensive, hook that up just to actually see what the oil pressure is. Does the motor sound okay? Any knocking or ticking? If not most likely the sender is just bad.

 

I was going to manually check the pressure but I was to retarded to look for a gauge at autozone the other day. Yes, I filled it up with oil last week too. I was thinking it might be the sender. Is common for the oil pump to go? I don't think I have seen anything on the threads I look at on HT about oil pumps/senders going bad, so I have no idea. What would be more likely to go bad the pump or the sender?

Also, I know it is probably in the manual but since you all are so nice...what should the pressure be?

Thanks!
-John

 

It's a little annoying to do, but easy to tap into, there are allen head caps in the head that hold oil pressure. Is you oil pan dented at all? That's a reoccuring problem with SR20's, you dent the oil pan and it blocks the oil pickup.

 

Nope! Brand new oil pan and brand new gasket, as of about 3 weeks ago. I just ran out to check my oil, I am like a 1/4" above the full hole on the dip stick, so I haven't been loosing any oil, and have enough. Will have to check the pressure manually, if the pressure given by the mechanical sensor is low then I have to replace my oil pump? How hard is that?

-John

 

If oil pressure is low on the gauge it doesn't necessarily mean your oil pump is bad. If you ran out of oil previously you could have wore you main bearings down a bit that causes low oil pressure. It happened to my old single cam but the oil light would come on at idle

 

try this...... turn your car on. take the oil cap off. while the car is on, put your palm on there. now see if you have any air pushing threw. if you don't most likely your oil pump is dead.

 

fail

 

x2 man, what the hell does blowby have to do with the health of your oil pump *facepalm*

 

Turn your car on and put your mouth around your exhaust. If you feel dizzy and tired you have a working engine.....

 

I saw this this past week. I am still wondering how my oil got so low and am monitoring the situation now, but just as you wrote, the oil level was barely showing on the dipstick and indeed on turns or every so often the light would flicker. Evidently this is not the OP's problem; just noting for the archives.

 

also interested in some ways

happen to have an offer of an LS swapped sexy 92-95 hatch with this issue basically for my ugly beatup ls swapped CRX

 

***UPDATE***

I got an oil pressure tester.....hooked it up and it idles at 25 psi, then at stays steady at 75 psi from 5k-7.5k the weird part is that it isn't a linear increase to 75 psi, at around 2k-3k it is at around 50 psi. I noticed during 1 run it was up at 50 psi at 2k rpms. Which seems to be high. Is there anything I shoul dbe concerned with or does this seem normal.

-John

 

Pressure will not vary linearly with RPM. (Maybe you are thinking of volume flow rate varying fairly linearly with RPM.) The 89 CRX oil pump is the same as the 92-95 Civic oil pump. The 92-95 Civic shop manual specifies, with engine fully warmed up (rad fan has come on twice):

idle, oil pressure = minimum of 10 psi
3000 rpm, oil pressure = minimum of 50 psi

So your results sound normal.

Seems to me it is pretty rare to hear of an oil pump failure. Oil pressure switch failures seem to come up more. I would be inclined to change the oil pressure switch. At least test it per http://media.honda.co.uk/car/owner/m...H200/16-91.pdf.