TankWatch III, fixed

[Pascal]

my Tank Watch III had been out for a while, first lost the green/empty, then the red/full and finally the orange/mid. I've been procrastinating on tackling it... turned out it's not as bad as it seem.

i looked at the manual on the sealand site to see how it was set up. turns out it's just a matter of unscrewing the 3" fitting, pull the whole thing out and cleaning the 3 floats.

I temporarily covered the hole with a ball of papertowel to limit the smell, not too bad it cleared up after a few minutes.

the bottom float was the worst, stuck with scaly deposit (10 years ...), midle float was a little better, top float was fairly clean except for some TP. cleaned it in one of the head, scrubbing with a brush, then forcing the floats up n down to remove the scale, put everything back in and now it works...

I love it when i can fix something without having to buy any parts !

[Maynard Rupp]

I did that last year with our water tank gage. First the "Kroil" to break the threads loose, a 2 3/8" wrench, 6' bar, lots of grunting, then out comes this scaley mess with the float in pieces. Cleaned all the scales and crud, made a new float from closed cell foam that I had left over from some carbon fibre rudders I made for my kids olympic campaign, some glue and thread, and wow, we have an almost new water tank gager. Works great and I hope it lasts a long time. I pulled the fuel gage and it looked like new. Apparently gasoline isn't as hard on the gage parts as water. That sure is hard to believe eh?

[Pascal]

the tankwatch use a float that slides up and down by about 1/2" to trigger a reed switch. doubt the float can be home made.

[Maynard Rupp]

You are correct Pascal. I was refering to the Hatteras factory direct reading gages. Sorry for the confusion.