Like many of you, I experienced a gas level gauge that was constantly stuck on full. I happened to be dropping the tank to sump it, so I decided to investigate to see what was going on.

Unplugging the fuel pump and sending unit showed a full level on the gauge. Shorting the black to tan wire locations on the body side connector showed a level of empty so deduced that the wiring and gauge were good.

I then used a multimeter to ohm out the purple wire on the sending unit itself while moving the float up and down.... The multimeter read open circuit.

I priced some new sending units and they seemed to start at $188 which gave me some more motivation to try to figure out the problem.

I saw that the sending unit was held together by 3 tabs which were folded over, two on one side and one on the other. I pried back the one tab by itself and pulled the sending unit case apart.

Inside was a metal strip with many folded up contacts. The shaft that the floater was connected to had a spring loaded contact which touched the metal strip at different points depending on the level of fuel in the tank and the position of the floater.

What i discovered was twofold: first and most importantly, the metal strip had a tab connecting it to the sending unit case and on my unit, it was making insufficient contact to the strip, so i bent it down. After that, i put the unit back together only to find that the unit read full scale resistance no matter what the position of the floater.

I took the unit back apart, used a bit of sandpaper to clean the contact on the shaft, then bent the contractor a bit more to preload it against the strip, put it back together, and it worked!

 

nice....this is my next task

 

Got the tank back in, put 5 gallons in the tank and the level on the gauge appears to be correct.

 

Taking mine out tomorrow. Thanks.

 

Is this fix still holding up? I'd much rather not buy a new sending unit, and my gauge reads just under half full with I fill it up completely…..