Hello guys,


This is my first post, I hope to make some friends here. I'm 27 and my family owns a 55 Ford Town Sedan, I've done all the work myself to get her back running again and we just took her on our first long high speed test-drive 16 miles there and back at about 55-60mph consistently. Anyway, the engine sounded great, when she's going she does great. We still have a bit of a problem with the ending wanting to stall out on a hot engine when we slow to a stop but as long as I feather the gas she keeps going. Probably a bad auto-choke. (this is a fordomatic btw).

Anyway that's not the real question. About 16 miles in when we were getting to our destination I noticed the stock temp gauge was reading a really high temperature, like just entering the red-line. Now firstly I don't know if these old engines are supposed to run at the same temp on the gauge as modern cars, should they stay about at the center of the gauge between C and H? Or do those old engines run hotter normally?


I had a friend with me, an older man who's good with car. When we parked her we opened the hood and he said that the engine wasn't overheating, he was touching the engine with his hand and said if it were he wouldn't even be able to do that. He said the radiator also wasn't 'gurgling.' I suppose yeah it wasn't SUPER hot, I touched it too. You wouldn't want to keep your hand on it, but yeah you could hold it on there a few seconds before it'd start to hurt.

I guess I'm just curious, could my old gauges be mis-reading? I know the gauges default to reading hot when the car is off, so maybe if it's mis-reading it'll naturally mis-read hotter rather then colder?