Oil pressure seems a little low. Help.

Just got my new motor put in and tuned. Now my oil pressure gauge (mechanical) shows what looks to be fairly low oil pressure. I am at 5psi at warm idle and at 3000rpms I am at 36psi. This seems a little low to me. At 6000rpms it is at 65psi which to my knowledge is plenty. Can anyone comfirm what the helms says for warm idle and 3krpms pressure? My oil feed line is a little larger than my old one I picked up from www.fast-turbo.com and was wondering if a larger feed line would lower pressure at all. BTW this is a fully built b16 by JG with only 100 miles on it and a brand new oil pump.

That is way too low… you should be around 10-20psi at warm idle, and 60ish psi at 3000RPM. what bearigns did you sue in your block and are you sure the clearences are correcT? too loose of bearigns can drop oil pressure. Too tight can raise pressure

well I guess I am calling up JG in the morning to ask them. sure hope I don’t have to rebuild the bottom end. in the mean time is there anything I can do to raise the oil pressure? I heard on honda-tech about shimming the spring the oil pump gear is on. something like that. anyone confirm this?

specs say minimum oil pressure at idle is 10 psi. and at 3k is 50 psi. stop running your motor and find out whats up. check everything. oil pump, oil pickup, pickup gasket. everything

yeah its not being run at all right now. I’m thinking bearings myself. but we will see.

im guessing theres something wrong with the oil pickup gasket. did you get a new gasket itself?

when i built a motor for my car, i forgot about the gasket, and put the oil pickup on. it had a small gap in the gasket. i had oil pressure when i first started the car, but it quickly dropped to 0 and at 3k it was bouncing around 40-50. air was being sucked in through the small gap, and when you revved it, there was more vaccum so it had to take in oil.

Guess I should start with that. I would assume that a company that builds these things would know to replace that but anyone can forget that I spose.

first of all what oil are you running? JG prob has the bearings kinda loose, then you run 20w-50 and you’ll still have good oil pressure. my guess is your running synthetic. I never have used synthetic oil, always 20w-50 castrol GTX. I have NEVER spun a bearing. being in min. it gets cold up there go with a 10-40, when the temps drop.

I run 10w30 and the car is only driven in the summer. you think something as simple as running thicker oil could help?

try 20w-50 it will help your oil pressure.