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ok, a bit of background here. When I bought this car, the fuel gauge never read empty. When I pulled the fuel sending unit to investigate, it seemed obvious that it was a patched together piece, with crimp connectors, and various screws and hardware holding things together, so I figured someone had patched in a resistor and float arm from another car, and it was simply not compatible. I left it be, relying on the low fuel warning light to keep me out of trouble, and that was fine, until . . .. the low fuel warning light stopped working. Once I established that it was the sender, not the bulb that had failed, I ordered a new sending unit from Honda.
Everything was right in the world for just about a year, THEN . . . the low fuel warning light came on non stop. Of course, by the time I found my sales receipt from Honda, my one year warranty had expired, so once again, I bought a new sending unit.
And, again, everything worked fine, this time for almost two years. Now, just a few weeks ago, I noticed that the fuel gauge wasn’t dropping all the way to E before the low fuel light came on. Over the course of a couple of tanks, I am now at the point where the gauge barely makes it to 1/2 before I am out of fuel. I have verified that the gauge is capable of moving down to the E mark, by disconnecting the sender and letting the gauge drop (not quite to E, didn’t want to break anything).
According to the manual, the resistance on my sending unit should be about 3 – 4 at full, and around 105 or so empty. The numbers I am seeing are 3 – 4 full, and about 40 empty, with a nice smooth transition between them.
Since the gauge drops to E with the sending unit unplugged, I am sure there isn’t a problem in the wiring between the sending unit and gauge, the problem has to be in the sending unit. Any ideas? I haven’t dug into the unit yet to see how the resistance is created, though it doesn’t appear to be the wound up resistance wire I am used to, looks like the wiper runs across a bunch of foil pads on a circuit board. I didn’t see any obvious problems with those foil pads, so I am assuming my problem is on the other side of the board, under the cover.
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