The beginning of the end of our fuel problems is at hand! After a long six-month period of fuel related issues, I can happily report they are almost over. In our previous post, I detailed the fuel issues we have faced aboard the good ship Nauticarazi. The final fuel issue was our fuel senders — the measurers that tell our gauges how much fuel we have in our tanks — good information to know, don’t you think? Our old senders are these big tube type, almost-three-foot-long things that look like this:
Inside the tube is a float that gauges how much fuel is in the tank. The mount of these has six holes and they bolt to the top of the tank, like in this photo, hanging down inside measuring the fuel level.
One of ours was ruined by the bad fuel and the other (we have two tanks) is of questionable character. They need to be replaced.
Simple enough, right? Right…
Ha ha ha. I jest, of course. Why would something so simple to replace be so simple when there is nothing further from the truth. Simplicity in boater-terms mean exponentially frustrating… the test, of sorts, to force you to check yourself against the “bad day on a boat is better than a good day at the office” scenario.
After an exhaustive search, some fellow Nauticat owners, who have already faced this fuel level sender dilemma, provided me with some part numbers for a replacement. I ordered ASAP.
Of course, what I got wasn’t what I had… they didn’t match. I sent them back and ordered the “correct” ones from a different part provider which clearly showed the correct sender as noted in the first photo above (see the six holes and the tell-tale red tube). What I got was the same as the first order. Not a match… And it still didn’t fit no matter how much I sat and starred at it. I was perplexed.
Come to find out, VDO, the manufacturer of the sender and gauges doesn’t make that sender any more and you can’t buy them… anywhere… in the whole world… at all! Period. The end.
They make a new one, of course, that is thinner, and smaller, and mounts with only 5 screws, saving me one whole screw! One. Whole. Screw. What bountiful economy is this?!
Sigh…
My options were slim.
First, I could send the old senders off to a company in Maine (or New Hampshire or somewhere over there) to rebuild these old senders (at $200+/- a piece, I might add… plus shipping both ways) and they weren’t positive they could repair them.
Or…
I could find a machine shop somewhere and ask them to make an adapter plate, also with no guarantees, also not the best of scenarios. And that certainly wouldn’t be cheap either.
I was out of options and getting more frustrated to the point I started dreaming of the office…
Before giving up, I did an exhaustive google search, I found an answer. There is an adapter plate on a pre-1956 Ford available in Iowa that would adapt from a six-hole pattern to the new five-hole. I called the guy and asked him to carefully measure the hole pattern. It matched! I ordered it arrived, and…
Of course it didn’t fit. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m guessing Ford didn’t even know about the metric system before 1956, why would I think it would fit just because some guy on the phone said so? That would be too easy! Ahh, I was missing the good old days of sitting in the office dreaming of these kind of days.
One last time, I expanded my google search to world-wide. I got just one hit… ONE…
At VDO in the Netherlands they had an adapter plate that, in theory, was the right specs. But I was skeptical, as I had already been burned in Iowa. But the Dutch? Can they be trusted? I don’t know. It sounded too good to be true. And this would be a presumably one-way purchase, as returning via international currier hardly seems economical. But after a long cost-benefit analysis and a sleepless night, I bit the bullet and placed my order.
And yay for the Dutch! They sent the order immediately, stayed in constant contact as the order was sent via PostNL, and surprisingly, it was here in a week.
And not only that… but they fit perfectly!!!
We are very happy to put all this behind us and move on to bigger and better projects.