Today it was fuel tank sender day.
One side looked great. Needed a small wire resoldered in order to get it working. The other side was completely covered in crud. And this crud smells as bad as the bathroom at your college dorm at 2:30AM after a big party when about six people have already thrown up. It's not making me sick like that would, but it smells terrible. 37-year old varnish from the tanks. Speaking of that, there is a major problem brewing, one that I do not have a solution for - more on that in a few days when I gather more info.
I took the fuel senders out (there are two fuel tanks) and wire brushed them to heck using the Dewalt drill (can't imagine doing them by hand). They cleaned up fairly well. I could buy new ones, but the only one I found (could not find a part number on them) were not an exact match. I bought it anyway, as a spare, it was only $45 or so for an NOS one - boy, this stuff seems cheap compared to Porsche parts (and in particular parts for a 962 or a 959! I think a 959 fuel sender (if you can find one) is probably $3K!
These senders work the way all the others do - they have a sliding contact that slides up and down a coil of wire. The more coils between the contact and ground, the greater the distance. To fix these, I cleaned the heck out of them (using isopropyl alcohol), and also used some small wire brushes made of brass attached to my Dewalt cordless drill (very slowly and carefully there). You don't want to damage the coils. On one of these, the small ground wire had broken off, so I resoldered the connect (had to scratch and prep the surface to make the solder flow properly). The other one, the contact strip was not making contact the whole way down, so I slightly bend it a bit. Both work now - tested them on the multi-meter. I tried to use the oscilloscope to test, but for some reason, I couldn't get the scope to work properly with these, so I just went back to the multimeter.
Tomorrow, we'll start tackling the brakes. I need to get the brakes down so that we can put the wheels back on to take the car out of the garage so that I can then work on flushing the gas tanks...
Left side (not as smelly as the right side):
