I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on an issue I'm having. I recently purchased an extremely clean 88' Cougar LS 3.8. Of the only few issues that it has the only one that I care to fix immediately is the fuel gauge not working. I had this same issue when I purchased my 87 Thunderbird a few years back and in that instance I found that the float had fallen off the arm on the sending unit and all I did was reattach it and it worked like a charm. So I went ahead and dropped the tank on the Cougar and removed the sender only to find that the float was attached properly and the sender appeared to be working properly. It read around 12 ohms on empty and 150 ohms on full. Mind you I have a base digital cluster in this car. Am I looking at a bad gauge or cluster at this point?
Any help would be appreciated!
The resistance is correct for a digital fuel gauge.
Is it safe to assume that it's a bad gauge then or are there any other factors that could contribute to this problem. All of the wiring on the undercarriage looks intact...
A bad ignition switch can kill gas and temp Guage. A bad or loose wire will kill either or both. Exhaust routed too close will eat up wires, mice eat up wires. The clusters themselves, the plastic circuit board can delamination and come apart.
There are a ton of variables, and it might not be super obvious and will probably take some digging.
Sounds like the Guage sending unit works, so I'd start at the cluster and work my way back.
Does this mean you only have the electronic speedometer and not the full electronic cluster?
If you have an buttstuffog fuel gauge you have the wrong sending unit.
It is in fact an buttstuffog gauge. It is entirely possible that I mixed up my full and empty readings when I was taking them though. The full electronic cluster reads opposite in the way of resistance right?
Yes the buttstuffog sender resistance is the opposite of the digital sender.
buttstuffog sender is 8-12 ohms full and 60-86 ohms empty.
Grounding the sender wire should peg the gauge to full. Have a helper watch the gauge so you don't have it grounded too long.