Thanks for the feedback. What I'd been thinking was that any modern VOM will be current limited and probably to a current safe for pretty much any electromechanical device. After all, you can short the probes together to zero the meter, and not run down the fairly small battery. And I'd seen the site you pointed to, and they were using a VOM to check the gauge they were fixing. So I tried this on my newly re-manufactured gauge I'd just gotten on e-bay, to compare the resistance on my old gauge that I knew was reading properly, to the new one, to see if I'd need to add any extra resistance at the gauge to get an accurate reading. And oddly, the new gauge was reading open, right out of the box. So then I started getting paranoid and thinking maybe a VOM could damage the gauge. An I'd also seen some articles somewhere indicating some gauges had fusible links, and that might be worth checking since mine was reading open, if there were actually any links inside.
