Chevelle updates

[RPOLS3]

Saturday afternoon I spent 4 hours messing around with this. Ran a jumper wire from the sender ground to the negative terminal of the battery - nope. Lowered the tank again and removed the sender, re-tested out of the tank and all good. Put back together and nope. Lowered the tank again, tested the original sender after a ground wire repair and tested good. Put the original sender back in the tank and - nope. Ugh. So as I lay on the garage floor under the car defeated, thinking about what to do next, I thought to myself, what would Dad do here? He'd rig up some sort of tester to see why it wouldn't work in the car. I took some fishing line and tied it to the float on the repo sender (4th time in and out) so I could move the float up and down when in the tank to make sure it was moving. Put it all together, pulled on the wire to move the float and........bingo - the gas gauge was moving accordingly. Hmmmmm. When I was talking about this with another car guy locally he said maybe the 4-5 gallons of gas you have in the car is not enough to move the needle yet..........not sure why that would be. Once I knew the float worked in the tank I gambled that not enough gas was the issue. So I put everything back together and ran out of time last night to test. First thing this morning I ran up to the gas station and filled it up and guess what - the gauge started moving. I will run the repo sender until the original is rebuilt (I'm getting good at replacing them now ).

Hoping that sharing my experiences here saves someone else some time.

[Too Many Projects]

You should have bent the float wire until the gauge read a quarter tank with the 5 gallons in there. They ALL seem to need bending to read anywhere near correct. They package them in the smallest box possible, which has the float up tight against the tube and it wouldn't fit like that with the wire bent out for the float to be in the correct location...

[RPOLS3]

Originally Posted by Too Many Projects

You should have bent the float wire until the gauge read a quarter tank with the 5 gallons in there.

Absolutely correct - in retrospect I wish I would of.

At this point I'm just happy it works and it is all back together so I can enjoy it. Got it cleaned up and ready to driving season this morning after the fill up.

[Too Many Projects]

Glad you have it together to drive and enjoy in the mean time. Curiosity...what does the gauge read with the tank full ?
I'm rebuilding the seats for my '66, hoping to have it presentable for shows this summer. Found out the hard way that the GTO buckets I bought as cores 15 years ago are different than Chevelle...who knew. I'd always heard they are all the same seats, not true, Back rest springs are very different.

[RPOLS3]

Originally Posted by Too Many Projects

Glad you have it together to drive and enjoy in the mean time. Curiosity...what does the gauge read with the tank full ?
I'm rebuilding the seats for my '66, hoping to have it presentable for shows this summer. Found out the hard way that the GTO buckets I bought as cores 15 years ago are different than Chevelle...who knew. I'd always heard they are all the same seats, not true, Back rest springs are very different.

Reads 3/4 when full, so an adjustment to the float is in order.......

I feel your pain on the seats, just went through this with the seat backs on the 409, Impala is different than Biscayne or BelAir..........which is not what the rest of the world thought when I bought the bench seat........

[Too Many Projects]

Your seat ordeal came to mind when I was informed about my seat issue...

A guy on Team Chevelle is really good with these seats and is making up new upper spring sets for me to convert the BOP springs to Chev. Very lucky to have found him and his willingness to help me out. VERY reasonable on cost too.