[AMC-List] gas tank sending units in Americans

["Mike Kindle" <mike90066@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

What goes bad on these in Americans: the L-shaped copper finger that goes up 
and down touching the  the coil of resistance wire inside the unit falls off 
the metal arm to which it should be attached.  You get an empty tank 
reading.  If you pry back the three tabs to open up the sender to reveal the 
wire coil, you will usually see a seperate L-shaped copper finger kicking 
around.  I drilled the metal arm and copper finger with the tiniest drillbit 
and carefully riveted them back together with the tiniest copper rivit.  No 
pop rivet is small enough, but I lucked out at a surplus aircraft hardware 
store and found some really small solid ones.  One could probably make a 
rivit out of solid copper wire, annealed(softened) by heating to red on your 
gas stove, and then hammered with the smallest hammer.  A check on my repair 
with an ohm-meter showed that resistance varies with movement so I think I 
got it right.

New replacements run near 90 bucks from the vendors.

I tried to repair one once years ago with solder and had the joy of watching 
the gage sink down to zero one day as the arm fell off again.  We'll see how 
the rivit does.

Mike Kindle


_______________________________________________
AMC-List mailing list
AMC-List@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wps.com/mailman/listinfo/amc-list

or go to http://www.amc-list.com