Interesting Situation regarding oil pressure

Last week you may remember that I posted in here about changing my oil presure guage and the line. Ok done that and all was right. The new guage showed 68 lbs on start-up. I checked the oil yesterday before I started to mow some grass. There are 3 lines on the oil dipstick. The oil was at the middle line. I thought it was low and added oil to bring it up to the top line. Problem now is that I dont show any oil pressure on the new guage. ( Before adding oil there was all kinds of pressure ) After about 10 minutes of running the pressure will come up to about 10 lbs. Question is , was the oil level ok to start with and have I over filled it? Any thoughts would be great. Other than that she workd fine. Thanks in advance ----- Barry

WOW, you learn something new everyday. Banjo, eh. Maybe I shouldnt have put the gaskets in to start with. I didnt know they were copper until I read your post. I thought that they were very worn out gaskets. I may take it back off and put the copper washers back on. Thanks Jim

Not feeling like an overhaul at the time, I bought some 40W HD oil and drained the (yesterday's new oil and installed today's new oil. Curiously, the oil was black as tar after only a couple hrs of engine operation. Hmmmm cleaning up sludge.

Put in the new oil and started the engine. Waited and waited at idle for the pressure to pop up on the gauge. It didn't. By now I am starting to worry. So I hit the throttle and it immediately jumped up to 60 psig. No problems after that.

Don't know if it was a gauge problem, or if the oil was too thick to flow thru the oil pump inlet screen, or some crud that may have been loosened by the detergent in the new oil.

The single grade oil did help the (hot) pressure a lot. At Idle it will hold 20 psig whereas it was falling to 5 with the 15W-40.

Wouldn't this condition cause the gauge to read pressure with the engine off, not vice versa which is the case here?

I think the problem is a coincidence as adding oil has nothing to do with the gauge reading other than as mentioned, being out.

I think what I'd do is crack the nut on the back of the gauge, start the engine and look for oil leaking out. Does 2 things, 1, tells you you have pressure even though the gauge doesn't record it, and 2, purges the line. Then tighten it back.