suddenly loose steering and dead brakes (Page 4/4) armos MAY 14, 11:11 PM quote Originally posted by cartercarbaficionado: I'm used to gms of this era breaking but thus is getting a little ridiculous for a motor with 50k miles on it. though I'm starting to doubt that statement from the seller because I put I think 10-40 or maybe even 15w-50 to keep it out of the red at idle quote Originally posted by 82-T/A [At Work]: Also... I wanted to add to this... your oil pressure sending unit might be bad. When my Fiero had ~90k miles on it many many many years ago... the oil pressure gauge was occasionally going into the red as I was sitting at idle, but good on the highway. This really freaked me out. I posted on here way back when... and someone told me to change out the sending unit. I did, and low and behold... the oil pressure started reading normal. I'm not suggesting you go out and buy a new oil pressure sending unit... but just be aware they do go bad, and it could be that. It might already have an aftermarket oil pressure sender, and some of those are just junk out of the box. Some of them have bad calibration and will always read low at a warm idle, even when new, causing the warning light to come on when in fact the real pressure is fine. To confirm the real oil pressure try putting a mechanical gauge on it. Reproduce the lowest reading you get at warm idle and then see what the mechanical gauge says. It will probably read much higher than what the dash says. Either way, at least you'll know if you really have a pressure problem, and whether you actually need such heavy oil. I consistently had this problem with four BWD senders. They would read accurately at the high end of the scale, but they were severely out of whack at the lower end. Lifetime warranty is worthless when none of them work to begin with. The store finally just gave my money back. The AC Delco senders that I've bought all worked correctly (until they died), but the last one I bought was several years ago. They aren't super reliable but at least they're calibrated correctly. The senders I've used are the 1988 style. I don't know if the aftermarket 84-87 style senders have the same problem. Other possibility (less likely) is the wiring or the gauge, you can test that by plugging a fixed resistor into the connector. IIRC it's very close to 1ohm=1psi.