so im sitting here thinking about tomorrows work on my buddys truck... and im thinking since it was a 6 volt truck (52 chevy) im going to need to wire the gas gauge backwords right??? i got the 12 to 6 volt reducers, but ill need to hook the positive to the negative on the gauge right? and then the pos side to the gas tank sender? sounds right, but i just need ***urance.
Your asking us? Aren't you the same one that drew up a light wiring schematic in about 2 seconds on another thread?
yeah but thats if the whole thing is done with 12 volt. ive never wired a car with the 6 volt reducers. and used 6 volt gauges with everything else 12 volts. i just know some 6 volt systems are reversed, and i want to know if the gauge will work properly.
give it a try and see what happens. either it will read as it should, or it will peg the gage on empty. I seem to recall that GM gas gages don't care which way is positive, but it has been a while.
ok, got everything in the truck wired up, reversed it like i said. worked GREAT! the one resister on the amp gauge was getting red but i think that was cuz i had a bad ground cuz it was a little rusty there. so ill change that tomorrow. ill take pictures of the wiring so everyone can see how i did it.(if they care) basically the truck is converted to 12 volt except the 2 gauges.
it does, but i wasnt sure if it made a difference which way it went.... im not completely positive on how it all works.....*shrugs* i just know pos+ goes to neg-.
You should NOT need a resistor on the amp gauge. I hope you didn't put a resistor in the alternator/generator charging wire. The amp gauge doesn't care what voltage it's running. An amp gauge from a 6V car works real well in a 12V system. No modifications are necessary. I do like to put a fuseable link in the charging wire just in case the alternator shorts out. It's a cheap safety feature.
Yeah..I second that..NO resistor on the AMP guage...remember it is measuring Amps...not Voltage. The amp guage will work fine on either voltage. Tim MBL
well i dont think its amps, i just called it that. its a "BATTERY".... i think thats "dead" or "charge"????? im ***uming thats 6 volts would be the normal(middle) no i didnt put it on the alternator, PS i put a 12 volt generator and regulator in it.. i only put the reducers on the gauges. i only did that because i blew the last set of gauges when i converted to 12 without doing that.
That's an amp gauge. Charge and Discharge. It won't need any resistor. If it's hooked up correctly, it will move towards the D when you turn on the key (showing you that the battery is discharging). After it starts the needle moves over to the C side. After it charges some it will come back toward the center but still be on the C (charging) side.
yeah, get that resistor off of the ammeter! it will get red hot and could catch something on fire....
ok i will take it off. question though, the gas gauge isnt working i guess. my buddy said he put gas in it and it just pegs to the E side(just like it did when it was empty so i thought it was working) anyone got any ideas?
Whoo.... Pretty much ALL the current the gennie puts out goes thru the ammeter; you can damn near weld with that if you wanted to! Even with the resistor out of the circuit, the connections need to be dead-nuts clean AND tight otherwise the dash wiring WILL go up in smoke...that's a stupid car trick I learned last year and a story for another day. when checking functionality on a gauge set recently, I had to run the connections on the fuel gauge backwards from what I'd expected; reverse the connections and the gauge ought to work. Since the gauge does not require significant amperage you can 'back check' it's function with a pair of 1.5 volt batteries; you should be able to move the needle with the batteries in series.
well it wasnt working reversed. so i put in on the normal way and it works fine(touch the wire to the body and the needle moves) but it wasnt moving with the sender. so i took the sender out.... ****er was frozen, i got it to move.... 5 seconds before it totally disintegrated lol so.... gotta get a new sending unit, but at least i know the gauge works. i also took the reducer off the amp gauge ... but now its not moving at all. oh well as long as we know how much gas we got i really dont care.
That wouldn't work for an ammeter. As Chuckspeed mentioned above pretty much all the current from the generator to the battery needs to flow through the ammeter. If it were mine I think I'd just forget that gauge rather than risk a fire by running an essentially unprotected wire from the generator to the gauge and then to the battery. Cory
yikes! Maybe you ought to learn more about how electrical stuff works, before you do any more wiring. There might be a schematic for that truck on the tocmp.org site?
Most gauges are current sensing, but not polarity sensing. So hooking them up backwards will just destroy the gauge. In the case of that chevy truck, the only voltage sensitive gauge is the fuel gauge. The temp and oil are mechanical, and the ammeter senses amperage, not voltage. the semding unit for the fuel gauge on that model is 0 to 30 ohms, not like the later GM stuff, 0 to 90 ohms
ive never bothered hooking this **** up before, the only thing ive wired is the gas gauge, and i know that works on ohms. i think ill just unhook the damn thing cuz we honestly dont need it its not telling us ****. but for reference, wire from generator(Field? or Arm?) to amp meter, amp meter to corresponding connection on regulator. if you want to know how i wired the rest of the car i posted a whole schematic on another post. ive never had a car start on fire because of my electrical.
Wasnt this the running/driving from field to daily in 3 days you were boasting about when putting down the S10 swaps in other threads? I guess anyone can "daily" drive a 50 yr old truck with some jumper wires, boombox and a few fire extinguishers...
what the hell does wiring a few gauges have to do with the ignition system? nothing. the truck drives fine, the truck starts fine, and the trucks lights work fine.
okay.......that's not quite how it's supposed to work.... Perhaps it's best that you leave the ammeter disconnected.
well how am i supposed to know unless someone tells me... i guess i just piss to many people off on here.
Look up the wiring schematic for the truck, if you need help finding it someone could probably point you the right way. here's one for a 54 truck, probably similar? I think the 10 gage black wire is shown two ways on this one, the foot pedal starter and the solenoid starter (used with right hand drive, RD) wires are both there on the schematic, but only one is used on the truck. notice the ammeter connects to the battery on one side of the gage, and to everything else on the other side. So, all the current that enters or leaves the batttery goes THRU the ammter. An ammeter is basically a fat piece of wire that also tells you how much current is going thru it, and which way it's going. An ammeter is nothing at all like a voltmeter, and you seem to have tried wiring it up as if it were a voltmeter.
hey thanks! the truck is very close to a 54. it originally had a floor push ****on starter, but we put a later bellhousing on it so that no longer worked. i did hook it up like a volt meter... in fact a volt meter would be a lot more helpful, but the hell if im going to try and find one that will bolt in place of that thing, and eric doesnt want a goofy gauge mounted anywhere. ok i THINK i got it...... so i run the gauge IN LINE, on the 10 gauge wire from the battery(starter post). the main line i got going into the car is a 10g wire from the starter post +, it goes right to the back of the light switch(i use that as my wiring block cuz it has 4 places that can go off that, that are all constant +. so from the same post on the light switch i went to the ignition "batt"+. ill draw it up so you see. ok so what wire would it go "in line" from(1 2 or 3)? or should i just throw in the towel cuz im an idiot?
It would go inline on wire 2 sounds like you're figuring it out I would also put a 6 inch long piece 14 gage fusible link wire where the 2 wire connects to the solenoid, connect the 10 gage wire to the fusible link, and the fusible link to the solenoid. The fusible link acts as a fuse, and might save the wiring from all melting if there is a short somewhere under the dash.
I got a new float for my tank. All floats are the same I believe for around that year and up. You can use them on 12 or 6 volt. I wired my gas gauge up just fine with no issues and with out a reducer when i changed over from 6 to 12. But there was a tag on the back of my gas gauge stating the sending wire goes on this post. So i hooked the gauge power to the other one and it worked perfectly
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