yup beat me to it, I have the earlier style.

 

Oil pressure dropping when revving is a very bad sign.

Drain the oil and check for bearing material...

 

God I hope not.... This motor has 1.5k on it.

 

Way too low.

^^^^^^^^^^

This may be a dumb suggestion but check that your not leaking anything into your crank case. I had a 4.3 CPI s10 that leaked fuel into the crank case. It seemed to thin out the oil resulting in lower oil pressure.

 

If that's cold then that's bad.

The smell of fuel in the oil would be extremely strong.

 

Yeah, oil is dirty, no strong fuel smell. I brought the filter to the builder today, there is a TINY bit of gold dust in the oil that came out of the filter, nothing that says failure though. Filter was cut open, it didnt have any excessive ammounts of metal in it. The Filter was a REAL short filter though, and looked wrong for the car. It was pretty damm dirty too. We are going to change the filter and see it that helps.

 

Wow. Changed the oil filter out with a K&N filter, and now the stock gauge goes right to the 3/4 mark on a cold start. The filter that was on there was a pro-motive filter.... Says made by wix.

Im changing the oil as we speak, just to make sure there isnt excessive metal in it.

 

Weird never heard of an oil filter doing that. Is it possible that the filter wasn't letting enough oil through? Glad you got it sorted out though.

 

Yeah it did smell like fuel. It was just a thought from experience.

 

cut that filter apart and find out why it failed before running that engine any more.

 

Filter was cut, nothing in it really, just a bit of gold dust. The fliter element looked..... Deformed? Ill post a pic up, but no shavings or chunks of anything, just REAL dirty.

 

I think the filter was too small, it collapsed internally, and wouldnt flow much. It probably made.the pump pressurize to the point of nypass, and it simply dumped most of the oil back into the sump.

 

did you squeeze the oil out of the element then look at it? or did you just spread the pleats apart and look at it? "gold dust" does not sound right or good.

 

We squeezed oil oit, we also spread all the pleats apart.to look for flakes/chunks. The gold dust was extreemly minimal, just a bit of a visible swirl when tipped the right way in direct sunlight. It was minimal enough where i couldnt get a pic of it, no matter how hard I tried. This is only the second oil change on the motor, and the first after the initial fill. This oil has roughly 2k on it.