I can't comment on 440s in particular, but it's my understanding most cars would have the temperature gauge behaving like that when there's an open circuit to the earth. Either a duff switch, or chafed wiring allowing the circuit to be completed.
If you remove the wire on the temp sender, and it does the same, its probably chafed wiring. If you remove the wire and the temp gauge then reads 0, it's probably the sender unit.
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