Should the oil relief spring be so tight?

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In my quest to solve my overheating issue, I'm installing a pile of gauges. Good news: The CHT and tach work great! Bad news: The oil temp and oil pressure appear to not be working (temp pegs high, pressure stays at 0). But that's a problem for tomorrow.

For today: When I pulled the rear oil relief plug, the spring and piston dropped out, no problem. When I went to reinstall, though, the spring stuck out of the case almost an inch, and it was a stone cold beyotch to get the VDO sender plug to catch the thread. It did, eventually, and it tightened down to the case just fine.

But it strikes me that that is an awful lot of pressure/tension on that spring. Is it supposed to be that way? Or did I somehow catch the edge of the piston on the barrel, or something like that?

I only ran the engine for a few seconds to check the gauges, in case I screwed something up and it really is generating 0 psi oil pressure. (I don't have the T for the oil pressure sender yet, so I'm running without an oil pressure warning light at the moment.)

Oh, also - I promise I put 2.5 quarts of oil back in it! I might be dumb sometimes, but I try not to be stupid.

[Wildthings]

It does take some effect to install the plug, but I would remove the plug, spring and plunger and use a pencil or something to determine the depth of the bore and then compare that to the assembled height of the plug, spring, and plunger. You could have some wrong parts in there. Are you sure you have the plunger in the right way?

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The piston is grooved, and I put the groove toward the top - that's what it looked like in all the diagrams I saw, so I'm assuming that's correct.

I'll pull it in the next few days to check as you suggest. It turns out the gauge issue was because I had the negative and signal leads switched on both gauges. Once I fixed that, the pressure gauge pumped right up to 40 PSI at cold idle. Haven't had a chance to get it warmed up yet, but that seems decent to me.

[rockerarm]

Hi. If you have a dual relief case the two relief pistons are not of the grooved style. This may be the reason for the slight difficulty on the install as you might have the aftermarket "oil pressure booster" kit.
Hope this helps, Bill.

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Bill, would these be the correct things to replace with?

OE piston: https://www.cbperformance.com/product-p/113-115-411.htm
OE spring: http://www.cbperformance.com/product-p/111-115-421a.htm

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Also, if I understand how the relief valve works, it seems like having a stronger spring would force more oil through the cooler. Given that I'm still chasing a hot oil problem, would it make sense to replace the spring with the softer OE one, or it is okay to keep it pushing more oil through the cooler?

I get replacing the piston, though. Just curious about the spring.

[rockerarm]

[rockerarm]