I'm no longer able to tell stories about troubleshooting my Reatta but I do have an interesting troubleshooting story about me wasting several hours of my time by making an assumption about how something works.
Since I got my GT I always wondered why the oil pressure gauge went up half way to the "normal" position when I started the engine cold or hot and stayed there all the time no matter what the RPM. That seemed odd to me so I temporarily installed a mechanical oil pressure gauge on the engine to make sure I had good oil pressure. The mechanical gauge showed 75 psi at idle on a cold start and then it went down to 35 psi at idle when fully warmed up. Spec in the repair manual is 20-45 psi at 1500 RPM when hot. I had 49 psi at 1500 so oil pressure is great.
So, in typical Reatta thinking, I assumed the oil pressure sending unit was bad and replaced it with a new one. Still the gauge in the instrument panel read "normal" all the time. Bad gauge? NO. After reading on the forums I discovered all GTs of similar model years as mine have the same "normal" reading without the needle ever moving just like mine. The gauge isn't a real oil pressure gauge at all. IT'S AN IDIOT LIGHT in the form of a needle on the instrument cluster gauge. The oil pressure sender I replaced is just a switch that closes above 6 psi and tells the needle in the gauge to move to the normal position. Either the gauge reads "0" as it does when the engine is off, or "normal" no matter what the real oil pressure is as long as it's over 6 psi.
For me, the oil pressure gauge is the most important gauge on the dash of a car. You can't even make the gauge on my GT work as a normal oil pressure gauge that actually reads pressure by installing a real oil pressure sending unit. It wasn't designed to do that. What were the fools at Ford thinking when they put a oil pressure gauge like this in a Mustang? Even a real idiot light would be better than this stupid gauge design.
Rant over 🙂