Fuel Gauge fault traced

The full story is that the gauge worked fine for years. I took the tank out and welded in a new bigger bore outlet for the PI, washing the tank and generally having it at all sorts of angles in the process. I think the gauge worked fine after that but immediately I'd done the welding I replaced the tacho cable and disturbed the instruments in the process. The gauge then read zero so I pulled it out and found a dodgy earth, I put a new terminal on the earth (I think this is the earth for the light and nothing to do with gauge operation). So then the gauge read full (wrongly but I thought it was OK).
Last night my brother in law came round (I'm recovering some lost data from his laptop for him) and so I pressed him into fault finding service - he used to race a Vitesse in the early 90's and is a lifelong Porsche technician so he can be very useful :-) Testing voltages and resistances, pulling wires off the sender and joining them together all indicated that there was an intermittent fault with the sender. As the tank was quite empty I could pull the sender out and sure enough, the fine wire of the variable resistor was broken.
There was nothing at all wrong with the gauge!
We tried to solder a repair but the old wire refused to take any solder so in a bodge I managed to weave some fuse wire into the right place and got the sender working. We reassembled it all and it seems to be OK - I'll get another sender ASAP and hopefully replace it before the RBRR!
The computer fixing then swallowed the rest of the evening so my metering unit modification will happen today!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More Lucas PI info - some pearls of wisdom here :-)

Over the years I've collected loads of info and books about the PI system, some better than others. I have always meant to scan and post up some of the more interesting stuff. I had my scanner working recently (but not on my spanking new Vista equipped PC - incompatible!) so I thought I'd scan a few things when I came across an old trio of A4 sheets held together with a rusty staple. They appear to be pages from a magazine article but from where I don't know. The last page has a few small adds on it but no clue as to where it first appeared. The opening paragraph suggests and owners club and the adverts are 1990 vintage - if you know where this came from please let me know and I'll give them the credit. Anyway, I scanned it and OCR'd it and here it is. I've been through it to correct the OCR errors but if anything doesn't make sense shout up and I'll check the original. THE LUCAS PETROL INJECTION SYSTEM - MARK II We are very fortunate to be able to publi...
Read more

Worried about your trunnions? Relief is to hand!

Image
This is an bit of an infomercial for my mate Dave and his company Canley Classics. I know Dave well, I get most of my Triumph stuff from him. I sometimes work on the Canley Classics stand at shows, I own a Canley Classics T shirt and I have spent many hours driving Triumphs with him. Other Triumph parts suppliers are available, your mileage may vary and this may contain nuts. If you don't like what I say, ignore it :-) - It's a well know fact that the small chassis Triumphs have some design frailties. One of the more spectacular failures you can suffer stems from the front trunnions. When you get a failure here you can loose a front wheel - this isn't a good thing. Often incorrectly known as "trunnion failure" what actually happens is that the vertical link that sits in the trunnion snaps - it does this for a number of reasons, lack of maintenance, fatigue, corrosion, previous trauma, bad luck. Most often it's the nearside that goes, it's the side that ...
Read more

TR6 Clutch investigation (and interior replacement)

Image
Blimey, it's been a long time since I did anything serious in the garage. Having found myself with some time on my hands - I'm currently looking for paid work again - I decided it was high time I sorted out the TR6 interior. When I got the car it was the interior that let it down, a bit of a mix of old and repro trim, mostly past it's best, carpets stick directly to the floor and sagging seats. I did the seats immediately and then gathered the parts to do the rest - new carpets, underlay, a trim kit, H frame cover, clips and fastenings, glue, etc, etc. So it seemed like a "cheap" job as I had all of the big cost items. It was just time - and now I have that. So I stripped it all out and there it sat earlier this week, looking all empty and then I thought what a pig of a job it would be to have to take it all out again to fix the clutch! You see I've always had a tricky clutch in the car, not awful but occasionally when warm it gets quite "off/on...
Read more