The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The Electrical Bay Different approach to fuel level sender...

I'm afraid that is going to be the case with this design no matter who makes it. I should mention because of the design there is 9 inches of travel with this one...or roughly 230mm. With 30 ohms to play with and 11 steps you get 2.7 ohms per step (roughly) and that's pretty close to what they used. Not having the float go all the way to the top isn't a problem in my opinion. There are reasons you should not over-fill the tank of the AD.

As I said, more steps are better and getting used to the difference may be the best answer. It reminds me of my grandmother when she said "well, you just haven't learned to like liver yet, but I'm sure you will." The magnetic reed switches are made in different lengths and in my experience the most reliable ones are 14mm in length (ignoring the connecting wires). The smaller ones fail very often and when they do you get a "dead spot" so the sender won't work at all until the fuel level rises or falls to allow the next switch to be activated.

I know how to make one of these that will show stepless variable resistance (using Kanthal wire and a sliding contact which would be drawn up and down with a magnet) but the challenge is in finding a wire that is flexible enough to allow a U bend in the wire without causing the sliding contact to hang up in the process of movement. In my experience you just don't have enough room inside the tube to do it and the wire gauge of the sender must match that of the fuel gauge or the gauge "sees" the wrong resistance. For anyone thinking about this, it is just like the dimmer part of the headlight switch. That's simply a coil of resistance wire and a contact wiper which acts as a current resistor.

And around 4 years ago I used flat Kanthal wire to make some senders (both flat-type wipers and the C shape---a design I do not prefer) which provided a perfectly smooth and absolutely linear variable resistance output from 0 to 30 ohms however the process is time consuming and expensive so there's that to consider. I could not make one of those units for $30. I tried, though.