Hello James

As others have said, oil pressure with cold oil can be off the scale of the Austin gauge. Even multigrade oil changes viscosity quite considerably with temperature. With my 1936 2-bearing Pearl I find it takes a mile or two of running to come down below 10 PSI. Running pressure with fully hot oil is then around 5 PSI , dropping to around 1 PSI at idle.

I keep an unofficial register of Austin Seven Pearls, and I would be very interested to know your car number (ACxxxx), chassis number etc if it is not already on the A7CA register. You might like to know that there are roughly 100 of the early AC Pearls and another 100 of the later ACA Pearls still surviving. This works out as a 5% survival rate which is quite impressive.

Best regards

John

Location: New Forest