Miata NB Oil Pressure Sender Replacement

The Mazda Miata is a very well balanced car and a good value on a per-smile basis, but the one thing that has bothered me since I bought the car is the fake oil pressure gauge. In a brilliant move which must save $0.50 per car, Mazda replaced the original Miata's oil pressure sender which was a real analog gauge with a nice digital idiot light type unit. To keep the gauge from looking odd with the needle pinned, they install the gauge needle so that it sits in the normal range when there is any amount of oil pressure in the engine. So there is two states to the gauge, "normal" where you have pressure, and "dead" where the gauge and your engine are both "dead". As has been stated elsewhere, this is the worst of all possible solutions. An idiot light would most likely catch your eye rather quickly. But this gauge which never moves is easily forgotten and when the needle does move, chances are it won't be noticed.
A couple possible solutions were suggested on the miata.net site. The first is to use an older miata gauge and sender. This does not work well on the M2 cars because the instrument cluster has been redesigned. The second solution found on miata.net is to use a sender from JC Whitney. This may work, but when I received my sender unit from them, I was so disgusted at it's quality that I never even considered putting it on my car.
I found a reference to using a VDO sender rather than that JC Whitney sender on miataforum.com. This looked really promising and my previous experience with VDO products had been good, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
Installation: NAPA auto parts stores carry a VDO sender which works perfectly for the Miata. It's napa part: 701-1823 (it cost me $34.89) This sender does not contain a switch for a warning light, but VDO does make a version with that feature if you want to add a light to your instrument cluster. The one thing that you will need is a 1/8-27 to 1/8-28 BPT converter. I had ordered the adapter kit with the sender from JC Whitney so I used that.

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