Gas Gauge Question

Good to know. I've gone just over 30 miles once the light comes on.
I was pretty nervous the whole way, but made it.

 

LOL...

4 (+/- 1/2) gallons when the light comes on... so how far you can go before running out depends on the mileage you get. The worse is usually 15 mpg (unless you are in 4WD)... so that would be ~60 miles. If you are on the highway, cruising unloaded under 75 mph, and get 20 mpg... then ~80 miles. I wouldn't risk it... !

 

This summer I was coming home from a fishing trip in Tennessee and my gas light came on. I was pulling my 16ft fishing boat which has a Honda 40 four-stroke. With about six gallons of gas in the boat, I was not worried about running out of gas. I drove over 50 miles before stopping to fill up. The truck held a little over 19 gallons. There was very few hills in the area I was driving.

My gas light comes on just before E.

 

i drove my 1988 1st gen for 5 years with a gas guage that didn't work. i wasn't gonna pay $500 to get the tank dropped and floats fixed and so forth. i just filled it up with gas every 250 miles on the odometer. never had any issues doing so. i figure a full tank you may go 400 miles total? not really sure on the 1st gens.

the point is why cut it so close? why wait for the light to come on to fill up? i know people that do that and sooner or later they all end up running out of gas at some point. i just shake my head. some people will never learn. it's ok to fill your truck up before it gets close to empty. it doesn't hurt anything and keeps you from running out of gas somewhere when you're in a hurry or something and can't stop to fill up.

 

I do not disagree. For me in this instance I was heading in the direction of a BJ's gas station with discounted gas. I had not hit E yet so I knew I had enough gas left but I expected the light to come on a bit earlier then Empty. When I did not see it come on I figured it best to search for that which I did not know. Now I know thanks to the information provided in this thread.

 

I don't fill up until the light has been on for a while.....

 

My light comes on around 2 dots before the "E". I believe it's around 3 gallons until I'm completely out. If I hit the gas station pretty quickly after the light comes on, I'm always putting around 17 gallons and change in it. And my truck gets horrible gas mileage. Probably because I drive mostly city and not a ton of highway. Just my .02

 

That all makes sense, now that I think about it I don't know another way it could function. Yeah let's see a picture

 

Sorry, i left work at 2:30. I usually start at 6AM and I actually got out on time today. Good thing because I had to pick up 2 tons of pellets for the winter. I'll be sure to grab a few pictures on Monday. We actually have a few different ones from two different manufacturers. I couldn't tell you what they went into though. We just make one of the parts for the assembly at my facility.

 

Here are a few crappy pictures. I was late to a meeting. This FDM is an older one. The newer ones are a bit different and other brands are also different, obviously.

The newer ones actually have a primary low pressure pump that fills a small cup with fuel. The main pump then pumps from this reservoir, ensuring it never runs dry. The filter on the newer pump is a filter sock connected directly to the secondary pump inlet, folded around into the canister. They are not easily accessible or replaceable. You can seen in these pictures that there is also a pressure regulator inside the tank.

If I can track down one of the other FDMs we have I'll grab somep pictures of that too. I can start a new thread so I'm not taking up any more space with off-topic stuff.

Link to gallery:
http://min.us/mMxIvhdbsRWBI

 

that looks like the crappy design that was in my Blazer's tank. Sending unit failed a couple of times, and initially there wasn't a replacement part for just the sender - you had to do the whole pump. I finally just quit repairing and drove by my trip-meter.

 

Yup, we are still making the part that failed you. I'm assuming the gauge on your dash stopped working? No surprise there is a big aftermarket/repair parts business for these units. Before you go bashing my company, note we only make parts to customer spec. We didn't design it. The part that failed is likely the grey hammer head thing in this picture: http://min.us/i/U0sG7ybcbC4S

These units were designed before the introduction of 10% ethanol additions to the fuel. The ethanol brings along with it some amount of water (it is also hygroscopic) and also makes the gasoline a bit conductive. They began to see corrosion issues with the copper based contact material and it is the source of a lot of failures.

Most of the parts we make now are either bi-metallic precious metal, or Inconel base with a precious metal contact.

 

Wasn't bashing you or your company as much as the original design that just quits working (very common on S-10's), or the gauge quits working after a certain point in the tank. I think my last replacement pump was an Airtex, which had a lifetime warranty, just the labor of dropping the tank was more thanI wanted to bother with.

I'm not a big fan of Ethanol - I've started running corn-free whenever I can- I'm lucky to have a station less than a mile from my house that sells it. I'm getting better mileage since I started filling up there - enough to at least offset the higher price per gallon most weeks. Not by much, but makes me feel better.