cautionary Electrical Note

Pete7 · Aug 14, 2010

I have a Farmall 340 that the past owner converted from 6 volt positive ground to 12 volt negative ground. Typical conversion. But the tractor has a factory gas gauge and it wasn"t working when I bought the tractor. Pulled the sending unit from the gas tank yesterday to look at it and found the variable resistor wire had melted and burned part of the insulating board! I"m guessing the past owner sent 12 volts direct to that sending unit when he converted the electric system. Lucky the tractor didn"t start on fire. So, if you are converting a tractor"s electric system to 12 volts and it has a gas gauge, you might want to be extra careful.
Pete

Owen Aaland · Aug 14, 2010

(quoted from post at 19:36:47 08/14/10) I have a Farmall 340 that the past owner converted from 6 volt positive ground to 12 volt negative ground. Typical conversion. But the tractor has a factory gas gauge and it wasn"t working when I bought the tractor. Pulled the sending unit from the gas tank yesterday to look at it and found the variable resistor wire had melted and burned part of the insulating board! I"m guessing the past owner sent 12 volts direct to that sending unit when he converted the electric system. Lucky the tractor didn"t start on fire. So, if you are converting a tractor"s electric system to 12 volts and it has a gas gauge, you might want to be extra careful.
Pete

While finding burned wires inside a fuel tank sounds extremely dangerous, in reality the danger is pretty low. Unless the tank has air introduced just before the wire gets hot enough to ignite the fuel, the air/fuel mixture will be so rich that it will not support a flame. When was the last time you heard of a fuel tank exploding from a defective fuel pump?

cautionary Electrical Note

Pete7

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Owen Aaland

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