A friend of mine bought a new plastic fuel tank for his shoebox and the place he bought it from wants to know the OHMS rating of the stock gauge to match up a sending unit for him. I didn't get the manufacturers name. Any body have this info. I looked on the shoebox forum and did a couple Google searches-no luck. overspray
2 minutes!!!! Thanks, Elpolacko. It feels like I'm in Phoenix here in North Dakota. It's been in the High 90's and 100's for almost the whole month. You can spit out the window and start a prarie fire. I don't know how you Arizonans stand it. We can put on more clothes when it gets cold, but you can only get naked in the heat and then you burn (especially my Norwegian white-legs). overspray
Shoebox tank senders are not rated in ohms . Sender has a coil of wire wrapped around a bi-metal strip with a set of contacts. Dash gauge also has a wire wrapped bi-metal strip. As the float in the tank goes up or down it changes the pull on the bi-metal strip opening the contacts, which stops the current flow, which cools the strip, and allows the contacts to close again repeating the cycle. If you use a standard type sender it won't work with the dash gauge. Temperature sender in right head and dash gauge and oil pressure sender and dash gauge work simularly (sp?). I have schematics if you need them. 14 scanned pages of all the Ford/Merc/Lincoln gauges I can e-mail if you want but PM me your addy as I can't figure how to attach pic's to the e-mail portion of the forum.
I used P/N TAN-ORG from Yogi's with my '40 Ford gauges (same guts as your '51). 73-10 Ohms. This sender uses the modern 5-hole mounting rather than the early Ford 6-hole pattern. This is on a 12V car using a Ford instrument cluster voltage regulator. Blown49 is right in that the early senders are goofy. I know you can use variable resistance sender if you also have the voltage regulator. I don't know if it's required nor do I know if it works on 6V. Note also that the early senders have the pivot really high. If you have a non-linear scale on your gauge face like I do, you'll want to try to duplicate the pivot location, I think, rather than following the sender mfg's directions. They seem to want to put the pivot half way down the tank. But then I'm kind of picky about my instrumentation ;-) Clear as mud? Chris