I agree that fusible links don't make a lot of practical sense; still, I'm sure I saw a thread somewhere indicating that some old gauges had them, and that was typically the first thing to go. But I'm thinking that this was not the case for this era GM vehicles.
I think that in the end, I know what to do. The ONLY thing that was working at all in the old gauge cluster was the fuel gauge, so it was obviously matched to the vehicle voltage, 12 V, and the sender. So I'll simply swap the old gauge into the new cluster. Kind of an odd thing to do, but probably the least work and most likely to work.
Thanks for the help,
Mark
