What’s confusing? The OE pickup is designed to be touching the pan. If you leave it .250-.375 away from the pan it will not pick up the oil off the bottom of the pan.
There is only 4 quarts in a stock pan. 5 quarts in the system. There is one in the filter, one is the system and 1-1.5 quarts fighting it’s way to get back to the pan. Plus there is some oil caught in the windage around the crank.
That means that there is about 1-1.5 quarts of oil in the pan at most at any time. And that’s not accounting for hot, thin oil moving in that cavernous unbaffled pan.
Doing the math says that the engineers who designed this **** had at least a clue as to what they were doing. That’s why they designed the pickup to touch the pan.
At this point it time, I can’t believe this is even a discussion let alone the argument that it is.
This is SETTLED fact. If you are using an OE pickup it MUST touch the pan.
Any other dimension is WRONG.
