Not to long ago I found out my car was leaking oil, It was a slow drip from the back of the motor. I diagnosed it as a bad oil pressure switch. Today I changed my oil pressure switch and it ran fine for 10 minutes. THEN... I noticed the oil pressure gauge dropped to 30lbs at 3000 rpms and 10-0lbs at idle!. I checked the oil level as soon as I got home and it hadn't moved. Could my pressure gauge be bad too?

Thanks

 

A good easy way to tell is to get a mechanical oil pressure gauge and hook it up to one of the pressurized oil ports at the front of the block above the timing cover or on the back behind the intake. You could even connect it where your existing oil pressure switch currently is located. If it's reading what your in-dash gauge is reading, that's a good sign the crank bearings are worn out.

 

Don't freak out. 3rd gen oil pressure gague systems are notoriously inaccurate. Usually they read low vs. reality when they go flaky. About half the time it's the sending unit at fault. The other 50% it's the gague itself, the gague cluster needing to be reseated in the dash to assure the contacts are solid, or the wiring in between the two.

Like was said above, a mechanical gague hooked up temporarily to verify the factory gague readings is the best way to go.

If it's running without valvetrain noise or other obvious mechanical noise you can rest assured it's at least not actually in single-digit territory!