After installing the New Speedometer Cable! in the previous post it was time to move to the next item.
Despite having a new sender the gas gauge still doesn’t work – it remains on empty. There might be a problem with the gauge, the sender, the wiring – or the tank might actually be empty. After all, this is a new gas tank that has never had more than a few gallons in it. And the car has been running incredibly rich, which would make it use a lot of gas. Hopefully the recent carburetor rebuild will help with the running rich situation.
The obvious way to find out would be to just fill it up. The downside is that a full tank is hard to work on. Filling it up is basically betting that it is good, with a real downside if I need to do more work on the tank.
Since the car was already up on jackstands and the speedometer cable installation went well I decided to go ahead and drop the gas tank.
The first step was to siphon out as much gas as possible. Which proved to be “none” – I couldn’t get the siphon to work at all. Deciding to take a chance I went ahead and dropped the tank. This isn’t really a huge job: support the tank with a floor jack, disconnect two fuel lines, unplug one wire to the sender, undo two bolts, and lower the tank on the floor jack.
With the tank out I emptied the gasoline – less than two gallons. OK, the gas gauge was reading empty because the tank was actually empty.
With the tank out I removed the sender assembly. Everything looked fine. The float assembly moved freely and the float was dry – no gasoline leaking into the float.
The bare float assembly was connected to the gas gauge wire and to ground and the car was turned on. The gas gauge remained on empty.
Next the float assembly was turned upside down so that the float was in the full position. This time the gas gauge moved to full!
At this point we had verified that the gas gauge, wiring, and sender all worked. Which is very good news!
The sender assembly was carefully reinstalled in the gas tank making sure it wasn’t binding on anything. The tank was then balanced on the floor jack, lifted into place, and everything reconnected.
The only thing left to do is add enough gas to drive to the gas station, fill it up (23 gallons of premium…) and verify that everything works in real life as well as the test case.
Next: more “progress” in Two Steps Forward. One Step Back. 1/2 Step Forward?.