Hey all, I've been working to restore my 88 GT and tried a little bit of fabrication to save myself a little bit of money. I was able to make a universal fuel level sender work for me and wanted to share with the rest of you. My particular fuel float arm assembly was reading 0 ohms regardless of position and the adjustment screws did not help. I considered the option of getting a complete sending unit from the Fiero store, but wanted to see if there was a cheaper option available. Take my experience with a grain of salt because I am sharing this BEFORE I see that it works well in the car for a while. If this fails I will definitely be purchasing the Fiero Store option.

I was browsing ebay/amazon for a 0-90 ohm float arm and was able to find this one for a pretty affordable price at $28- https://www.amazon.com/Univ...r/dp/B07S77K2CF?th=1
What I didn't realize before this arrived is that this mounts backwards as compared to the stock sensor. Which caused some problems I didn't expect.




1. I started cannibalizing the old sensor by sipping the plastic tabs that hold the body of the sensor to the tack welded sheet metal backing. It took a little bit of light prying, but I was also able to remove the float arm from the pivot.




2. I then did my best to straighten out the metal backing and trimmed away the areas past the 5 holes that were in it.

3. The idea I came up with utilized the slotted piece from the universal sensor, I trimmed that using an angle grinder and bored out the holes on the original backing to accept the hardware diameter that same with the new unit. I used the top section of the slotted piece (which had 3 threaded holes) to mount that to the original sensor location.


4. I then had to use bolts as standoffs to space the sensor back enough to clear everything. I also cut out a piece of aluminum sheet to use as a backing plate for the sensor to mount to. It is a bit janky looking, but it seems to be functioning as intended.


5. I then trimmed the length of float arm rod that I needed. I probably won't be prefect measuring the entire depth, but I made sure I would get as accurate of an empty reading as possible.
6. The last thing I did was re-terminate the black and purple wires with ring terminals. I put the purple wire onto the sensor standoff, and fixed the black wire to one of the bolts I used as a spacer.


Fitting this back into the gas tank was tight. The bolt heads from spacer bolts were pretty close- I almost considered grinding them down. I also had to lower the whole assembly with the float in the upright position- so when I need to remove it I will need to put something down there to fish it out first. Electrically everything checked out. I read 0ish-90ish ohms between the purple and black wires at the yellow connector, and had a negligible resistance between the red and black wires. Fingers crossed I didn't do anything glaringly wrong and some people can find this helpful. If someone has found a better option for a universal sensor please link it below- something that swings the correct way would improve this a ton.

[This message has been edited by MichiganReefer (edited 04-24-2023).]

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"Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne." - Kurt Vonnegut

[This message has been edited by theogre (edited 04-26-2023).]