1985-1998 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
Check out the two links below. Adam has installed a very appealing set of Auto Meter guages (including air/fuel) and Robert Davis has installed a set of five(!) VDO gauges in his Aero.
Personally, I'd get boost and oil pressure for sure. Oil pressure is quite valuable in monitoring the health of your engine as the idiot light has a very low threshold (it's basically gotta be pumping air to light up.) It can also be interesting to see how diferent temperatures/oils change the pressure and how it changes over the long run of your ownership. If I were keeping the car stock I would put in either an oil temp gauge (interesting for some of the reasons above, but only marginally useful) or a coolant temp gauge (can't trust the stock one too much, but a big pain to install.)
If I were modifying the car I would consider the A/F ratio or EGT gauges. Really these are only necessary for extreme modifications that might test the limits of the fuel system (running lean) or push the limits of the fuel curves/timing maps in the ECU. All this is probably even more applicable for highly tunned pre-trionic cars. Keep in mind that on a fuel injected car the A/F gauge is only useful at WOT where the computer is in open loop mode. Of course, it is important that you don't run lean hear. EGT will give you that info too over a longer period of time (lean=hot). Personally, I might go with the EGT as the computer will lower boost to comensate for detonation caused by momentary lean conditions, assuming that APC functions are retained. A fuel pressure gauge will also help make sure the fuel system is keeping up with increased boost. Both A/F and EGT have their place though, ESPECIALLY if you use manual boost controllers and other protentially dangerous enhancements.
From there the sky is the limit with intercooler in and out temperatures, head temperatures, etc. Again, while interesting, these are only useful for hardcore performance tuning. One cool trick is to install only one temp gauge but wire it to multiple senders and a switch, such as coolant and oil temps in one gauge or intercooler in/out, ambient, and head temps in one gauge. You'd have to research what ranges the gauges cover and the ohm range of the senders but its not too tricky.
http://www.geocities.com/wolny10/gauges.htm
http://members.home.net/iclick/saab/Saabdash5gauge.htm
Wow, that ended up being much longer than I thought.
Craig
No Site Registration is Required to Post - Site Membership is optional (Member Features List), but helps to keep the site online
for all Saabers. If the site helps you, please consider helping the site by becoming a member.