I have a '99
Boxster
that has 82K miles and I'm the third owner. When I bought the car, from a dealer, it had a 3/4 tank of gas or so I thought. When I filled up the gas gauge only registered just above the 3/4 mark. The dealer wouldn't do anything about it as it was purchased with no warranty, so I took it to a well known independent Porsche shop near where I live and was told it was the sending unit so I had it replaced and the needle still didn't go to full even after I pumped gas into the tank after the nozzle shut off. The shop told me to bring the car back and they would empty the tank and put back in a required number of gallons with a PS2 hooked up to recalibrate the system. After doing this and $440 later the gauge still doesn't read full after filling. The shop told me it is the gauge and I will need to have my instrument cluster removed and sent off for calibration. I took the car to another independent shop for a second opinion and the mechanic found that the hoses from the sending unit had not been tie wrapped in accordance with the sending unit installation instructions and the alignment marks were not set correctly when the sending unit was installed so I paid to have that done. Upon filling up the gauge now is back to the original 3/4 mark and at one point stuck at that position for almost 200 miles before it finally went down to below the halfway mark where it should be. I have yet to refill the tank to see where it lines up but I'm wondering if anyone else has this problem and what you did to fix it. The problem is not the carbon recovery as that was checked by the second shop and tested ok. :beer:
do you have the old sending unit ? are good with tools and elect meters ? do you have a pro repair manual for the car ? will you work on electric around gas ?
No, yes, Bentley's, no (can't work on car where I live or believe me I would have tackled this before I took it to anyone else). What's your thoughts?:cheers:
it aint good...you cant go back to shop A cuz shop B worked on it. you dont have the old sending unit to ohm check and i,m not sure about how to command a full/empty on the dash unit. unless some one else comes on board..its dealer time
outstanding sport fan...dont get too cocky....it may get 12 volts to gauge...but doubtful...maybe lower/pulsed etc voltage. who know what the elves in the black forest of ger. did on the wiring. older cars you could disconnect wire at sending unit and the gauge would go to full and if you grounded the wire it [the gauge] would go to empty. thats how ya checked if the dash unit was bad. but todays cars have low fuel lights,elect fuel pumps etc all in one unit that maybe the ECM reads first then gets the dash command to read...thats why the old unit would have helped. garage B can calibrate it ? what next with these cars ?
And to think a metal float, similar to the one that used to be in toilets, and mechanical linkage used to tell us how much fuel was in the tank and pretty accurately at that.
