Going nuts!

My 71 Dart Swinger Fuel guage has never worked since I bought the car 10 years ago, Temp guage seemed to. I decided it was time to fix it. After wrestling with the instrument cluster, I finally got it out and found some broken pins. I was able to strengthen them and repair the damage using my trusty soldering iron and some 5 minute epoxy. I verified continuity with my DMM. While I was at it, I also cleaned and soldered the connections for the voltage regulator and replaced the regulator.

Now that it is installed they seemed to work, but then stopped. And started again. And stopped. You get the picture. I removed the cluster and double checked the connections all seemed to be good. I checked the wire harness under the dash, cleaned the pins and reassembled.

Is there any suggestions from others who have been down this road and found some weird common thing wrong?

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If it's not at the cluster (and you verified that the circuit tracings on the cluster are still good)....And the wiring is intact, next is to get dirty...the easy one is the temp sensor wire visually inspect the wire going from the sensor at the front of the head...typically these get cooked and the insulation sleeve gets oil soaked and the wire insulation cracks and you get intermittent or non existent temp gauge readings....

Fuel gauge, the next likely culprit there requires jacking up the car and putting rear axle on jack stands so you can look at the back of the gas tank facing the cover plate to your rear axle...if everything is intact there is a metal strap the clips on the metal gas line at the chassis, and the other side clips to the fuel sending unit barb....typically one of two things happen here, the clips and the fuel line get corroded and no longer make a positive connection for "ground" for the sender, or the clip rusts out and no longer forms the connection (or worst case scenario...previous owner forgets to put it back on...).... You can do a search on the board to find a source for a replacement, option 2 is an OK work around, but not pretty and does not provide a permanent fix either, you can use a hose clamp to clamp a wire to the sending unit barb, and connect to the body or sub frame rail with a screw...

If those two are not the culprit, you may need to trace wires and clean up the bulkhead connectors....

Good Luck.

On the back of the dash cluster is a small rectangular 3 pronged gismo (resistor) that reduces the voltage from 12 to something less (5?, 7?) for the 2 gauges that you are working with.

They occasionally fail or work intermittently. There is an electronic replacement that you can build with radio shack parts, or maybe you can score one at the junk yard and just swap in an alternate and see if that cures the problem.

Actually there is a set of points that open close when heated by current flowing through them within that tin box with three legs. By opening and closing points the gage sees on average about 5 volts, so in a 12 second period, they are open 7 seconds or some multiple of that example. [/quote]

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67' Dart GT Convertible; the old Chrysler Corp.
82' LeBaron Convertible; the new Chrysler Corp
07' 300 C AWD; Now by Fiat, the old new Chrysler LLC

This item they are referring to is called an IVR They make electronic replacements for them which I would highly recommend because the mechanical ones fail and they may damage your gauges.

Brian

Here is one from Classic industries http://www.classicindustries.com/produc ... vr607.html

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63 Plymouth Valiant Wagon

Thanks for the replies.

I did clean up the traces and soldered the pins to insure continuity. I did replace the 3 pin voltage regulator. The gas tank was just replaced and the ground was correctly attached. This is a real head scratcher!

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