Redlining!!!

I took a short trip out to top off the gas tank, and I drove for several minutes with the tach well above 6,000 rpm in the red line. Do you think I caused any damage?

I did the same on the way back. I probably reached the exhilarating speed of 35 mph or so. My wife was very concerned about this.

I think there is some chance the tach on our 2005 automatic mini van may be broken since it sounds normal and isn’t smoking or throwing metal shards in all directions. It also idles at just over 4,500 and actually revs at 4,000 when shut off.

I tried to explain that a tach on an automatic mini van is about as useful as… well, something that isn’t really useful at all, but she is still concerned. I assured her I would fix it. I’m now cutting out a piece of construction paper and taking it and some tape out to the van to make it all better. Should I draw a dial on the paper with the needle pointing somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000?

Sounds like the tach is bad, but you’d better have it checked because the alternate explanation involves the transmission, a potentially costly repair.

If I use synthetic oil will it help with the high revs when it isn’t running?

How high up does the tach go? I’d be tempted to floor it in 1st gear just to see 8,000 rpm or higher!

It stops at 7,000. But the needle goes past that.

I asked my daughter if she had noticed this before since she had the van at school last semester and she said it has been off for a long time. She says it drops the off PRM about 5k every time it is turned off. It eventually resets to below zero and after a few more times makes it back to 7,000. Then you can drive it with zero RPM showing on the tach.

The funniest part was when I was showing my wife that it couldn’t be right since the tach read 4,000 and the engine was off so it couldn’t possibly be reving at 4,000 RPM and her response was “how do you know for sure?” (she’s not very mechanical).

I used to think my husband was the world’s bestest mechanic EVER! Until I found out that his way of ‘fixing’ whatever idiot light happened to be on involved a piece of black electrical tape. Over the light. I think at one point in my old pick up the entire DASH was nothing but electrical tape. :smiley:

Maybe use an actual [sewing] needle.

With a bit of thread dangling from it. Because, you know, BLING.

You’re fine. The rev limiter will not allow you to blow up your engine no matter how hard you press the pedal.

That doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to bounce it off the rev limiter for hours on end. You can damage your engine even with a rev limiter if you do something dumb.

**OP: **Driving for several minutes at 6000 RPM is probably a bad idea. If the tach is not reading properly, you should be able to tell – an engine revving at 2500 RPM sounds a lot different than one at 6000 RPM, and if you are idling at 4500RPM would be very obviously different than idling at the normal <1000RPM.

Your RPMs will always be the same in a given gear at a given speed. As long as your car shifts normally, your RPM won’t suddenly be different than usual in 4th gear at 40mph (or whatever). If your RPMs are actually higher than normal at 40mph, your transmission likely has a problem – for instance, it refuses to shift out of first or second or whatever.

Did you read the OP? He said the tach shows 4000 RPM when the engine is OFF!

I did. So if the tach is screwed up and the guy doesn’t want to fix it, what else can we talk about?

If my tach is broken, I wouldn’t say that my car is idling at 4500RPM, because it wouldn’t be. I’d say that my tach is incorrectly reading 4500RPM while the car is idling normally in the triple-digit range. Maybe that’s just me.

Sigh… it was tongue in cheek.

See, my wife was convinced it was something horribly wrong. I have this strange almost savant like ability to tell by listening alone that the engine is running somewhere in the 1,000 to 1,500 RPM range rather than the 6,000 being displayed. My wife however doesn’t have this refined skill set and was convinced that it really was running at that speed.

Also, did you catch that it is a V6 minivan… with an auto tranny. Tachs are decorative at best, and sometimes like in this case amusing. I thought some may like my creative solution of fixing it by taping a hand drawn picture of a tach at a reasonable RPM to placate my wife… and some may have even found it amusing.

I suppose I could have posted a thread… “My Tach is Broken”… probably wouldn’t have gotten much interest… not like this one that is just smoking up the post count! Maybe the post counter is broken.

So, I guess you don’t want to hear my theory that if I can get it cruising with the tach showing zero that I can keep cruising like that forever since I obviously can’t be using any gas?

Are you positive? I’ve also got a V8 Mustang GT and I love the sound of a high reving engine. I always put it in first and drive down the highway. I specifically checked and nowhere in the owner’s manual does it specifically say not to do this.

This is also tongue in cheek in case you are wondering

Here are some other replies that you can address…they seem to be giving actual advice too. One of them was even the very first reply.

Sorry about your thread, mister.

So basically you’ve got a (useless anyway) guage that is lying to you because it’s broken. I’m not hip on where a modern tach gets its information but I seem to recall on older cars it’s listening to the ignition system. Clearly, this is not the case for your car if it’s reading 4000 when the engine is off. My concern, then, would be–where is your tach getting its information, is the gauge broken or is it getting bad info from a broken sensor, and if a sensor is broken what else is thinking your car is revving all over the place? In short, is your ECU doing something to compensate for a phantom problem?

Spud, I thought it was funny.

Old vehicle, speed-o-meter way off.

Match speed with flow of traffic or use a portable GPS for speed.

I always cross check gas gauge with the resettable o-do-meter.

Old habits die hard.

The other possibility is to get some green paper (or white paper with green marker), and tape it over the red part of the line. Maybe with “Still OK here” written on it. Uses less paper that way!

My speed-o-meter seems to work just fine… my tacky-meter has a problem. It actually seems to still work, but you just have to “zero it out” at wherever it decides to start. It idles about 750 above that and revs to the expected levels above the random starting point when driven.

Maybe I need to find a way to make a spinning dial that I can reset to zero wherever the needle decides to point when turned off.

The biggest problem I have with this is that it would take some effort to fix something that is totally useless in this type of vehicle. For anyone who still wants to give advise… I know it isn’t revving that high… it is running just fine… it is shifting when it should. There is just this stupid gauge that is upsetting my wife. I simply found it amusing that she thought the gauge was right despite what I always assumed was a common sense thing… like the car will not run with no gas in the tank (even if the gas gauge says it is full).

I like this! My thought was to write “Holly Shit!!!” where the red lines should be on my static crayon drawing just for fun, but this would solve things even easier.