The Crusty Cuda: Whole lotta Shakin' (N96) Goin' on!

[njsteve]

More electrical progress. Mopars seem to be notorious for tail light issues with bad grounds. If you dont grind the heck out of the mounting area that the potmetal tail light housings mate up with, you risk intermittent light issues and backfeeding through the harness. Symptoms are cascading lights (alternating bulbs activating in a sequence) when you hit the brakes or the reverse lamps glowing dimly when the parking lights go on.

This car had no working license plate light, left rear marker light, and the dimly lit back-up lights glowing when the parking lights were on. If you use an alligator clip and wire to ground, they work fine as a test.

So the choice is pulling everything apart and gouging through new paint or the logical solution of just making some small jumper ground wires. So I got some spare 16 gauge wire and eyelet ends. I ran one from the side marker housing to the tail lamp housings and then to a prexisting screw behind the trunk latch bracing. None of it is visible to the prying eye. As for the license plate light, I had to pull the small potmetal housing out, and grind the area where the socket snaps into the housing. The galvanized coating and old finish just wouldn't let the grounding work. Once I did that, we had all the lights working as they should.

The crazy thing is that the factory uses a separate, designated ground wire for the headlight harness and front, grill mounted turn signals that screws to the radiator support but never bothered to do the same for the tail light harness.

Next fix, is doing the same jumper wire deal for the dash housing because the instrument panel lamps seem to pop the 3-amp "LPS" fuse intermittently. Cudas and Challengers used the gauge pod mounting screws and the little metal tabs under specific screw locations to be the grounds. If one of those tabs is gone, like on the switch pod that houses the headlamp switch, you get the grounding issue problem.

[njsteve]

Back from the frozen garage. It's snowing at the moment.

It took a while, but I got the fuel sender out of the tank without having to remove the tank.

First I siphoned most of the gas out.

The sender on an E-body is on the drivers side of the tank but everything is in the way. I disconnected the left muffler from the hanger under the trunk (after wrapping the exhaust tip in a towel so it wouldn't scratch the valance paint). Once the muffler was hanging about an inch lower, I was able to get to the heat shield that is above it. Once that heat shield was out it gave me a couple inches of room to work alongside the tank. Using a brass drift to avoid sparks, I was able to tap the collar off the sender and then do the obligatory "bent nail puzzle" removal sequence trying to get the sender out of the tank with the exhaust still alongside it. Of course the brass float goes in the opposite direction of the pickup sock, making it an expert level puzzle scenario. Eventually I was able to finagle the thing out from there without removing the muffler or the tank. And as you may recall from previous episodes, the tank can't come out without removing the rear vlance which in no way shape or form or coming off that car without scratching all sorts of other painted parts.

Once I got it out, I tested the original 1970 sender and as predicted, it is inert. So the removal was necessary.

Installing the new sender was just as much fun to maneuver back into the tank with the adjacent muffler in place. I got the sender lead back on, along with the ground strap and low and behold, it actually worked! I put all the gas back in and she now reads 3/4 full. That's all for today from snowy Joysey.