Based on seemingly only two options for replacement fuel senders for my D100, I opted to buy a stainless steel aftermarket one on ebay for 100 bucks. Mine had disintegrated into brown dust.
The ebay sender showed up and I measured resistance on the bench to make sure it worked. When the float was set to 'full' I got a reading of 9.8ohms. At about the 1/2 way mark I read 45 ohms. When the float was set to empty I registered 80 ohms. This is fine. I think Chrysler stuff is supposed to vary from 10-73 ohms based on fuel level.
So I drained the worst varnish ever from my 18 gallon plastic fuel tank in my D100 (such a horrible job) and removed what I could find of my original sender. I installed this new sender without any drama. I filled my fuel tank up all the way and dumped a bit of Seafoam in there to help the gasoline not get funky from the old stuff that was in there. My truck runs fine.
Except that my fuel gauge always registers Empty.
Out of curiosity I jacked up the bed and got under there and pulled the wires off of the screw stud connections. I checked resistance on a full tank of fuel and got a reading of 77 ohms. This would make sense as to why my fuel gauge registers E.
Just to verify my results, I hooked a 7 ohm resistor that I dug out of my garage parts between the factory fuel gauge wires and turned on the ignition. Sure enough the fuel gauge shot up to Full.
I asked the ebay seller if they've ever had issues and they replied that they have not. I'm just curious if any of you have experienced issues with these generic senders? 100 bucks is a lot of coin for something that I feel is worth about 25 bucks on any day of the week for several other makes/models of cars. I'm going to do the annoying thing and remove my pickup bed again and pull the sender out and re-check it on the bench. I'm just curious if any of you have dealt with this before? Thanks!
Here's a photo of what I bought.
