The fuel gauge on the Scout has been annoying me since I bought the truck seventeen years ago. \u00a0I took some time last weekend to jump the connection from the sender directly to the gauge, bypassing the voltage regulator, and found that the gauge does work correctly\u2014which means the issue is behind the dashboard somewhere. Next, I tested the voltage regulators on all of my spare oil\/temp gauges, and as far as I can tell they’re working correctly. Tracing the wire from the gauge back to its next stop at the harness, I pulled the bulkhead connector off the firewall and found that it was full of garbage\u2014tar and rust, which had made its way inside from the ‘sealing’ job the previous owner did at some point. So I cleaned all the contacts. With a new fuel\/amp gauge installed (this one with bright orange needles and UNLEADED FUEL ONLY added under the other text) I turned the key and got….nothing.<\/p>\n
So I figure there’s a break in the wire somewhere between the sender and the gauge, or a bad connection in the bulkhead connector. My next move will be to test continuity between the endpoints and see where the break is, then try to fix that issue.<\/p>\n
While I had the dash broken down, I cleaned all the contact areas on the circuit boards I could reach, and replaced the bluish LED bulbs I originally installed with newer, whiter bulbs. After buttoning the dash back up I was rewarded with a fully lighted set of gauges\u2014before this I only had two bulbs working on the speedo cluster, and a left turn signal indicator. Now I’ve got everything back, which is a relief\u2014including my right turn signal indicator! (now I just have to break the wheel down and fix the canceling cam).<\/p>\n
And while I was messing around under the dash, I spied pigtails coming out of the courtesy light harnesses and decided to test one with the existing door light switch on the passenger side. I put a test wire on it and when that actually worked, I decided to fix both sides. Someone had swapped in light harnesses with pole-style connectors, so I snipped those off and added blades to fit the ends of the main wiring harness. The driver’s door switch had been mangled long ago so I drilled and tapped a new hole for a used switch from the green truck and wired it in. And as mentioned earlier, I assembled a dome light for the rollbar from a new LED light, a length of wire, and a special automotive pigtail sourced at Nats. Feeding the wire down the rollbar, through the speaker hole, over the wheel well and into the rear taillight housing, I connected it to the factory dome light lead. Now, opening either door turns on the two under-dash courtesy lights and the dome light, which makes getting in and out of the truck in the dark much easier.<\/p>\n
I swapped the second of the two LED dome lights I bought in at the back of the Travelall, and that brightened the area up by a factor of five. I’ve got some switches coming to replace the ancient ones that came in the truck, and I’m going to design some new 3D-printed housings for each light to clean things up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The fuel gauge on the Scout has been annoying me since I bought the truck seventeen years ago. \u00a0I took some time last weekend to jump the connection from the sender directly to the gauge, bypassing the voltage regulator, and found that the gauge does work correctly\u2014which means the issue is behind the dashboard somewhere. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electrical"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58Ac2-1xY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5950"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5953,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5950\/revisions\/5953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}