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Perhaps I'm ignorant about what you're asking (I'm not
sure what a DOPS circuit is), but I think the two senders on top of your oil
filter flange are both involved in the warning circuit. One's a low-pressure
sender, and the other is a high-pressure sender. I don't know the details, but
the circuit seems to switch to the high-pressure sender when the low-pressure
one goes out of range. If one sender is bad or sticky, the light/buzzer may only
come for brief periods of specific engine loads while the engine is "between
senders". My '87 had this problem, and when I replaced them both, it went away.
YMMV, of course. If you're lucky, your Perpetual Oil Change system is entirely
due to the o-ring...
I can
also relate to the oil spillage issue. After she did the
first oil change on our brand new Subaru, my girlfriend didn't notice that
the gasket from the old filter got stuck on the flange (to her credit, I
probably wouldn't have noticed either...). We drove for about three days before
the double-gasket suddenly blew out one morning after we backed out of the
driveway. We got about a mile down the road before the oil hit
the exhaust manifold and started smoking (flat-four: the exhaust hangs off the
bottom of the engine). It's been over a year, and the huge streak on the road in
front of our house is finally almost gone! You could follow it very clearly down
the street, out the neighborhood, down the road...getting narrower as it ran out
of oil. It took numerous attempts with Simple Green to get the undercarriage of
the car clean. Luckily, there seems to be no apparent damage to the
engine.
Neal
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