I just repaired the gas guage on my old biodiesel mercedez. It wasn’t entirely broken but would get stuck at the quarter tank mark.

The problem was 23 years worth of gunk clogging the bottom of the guage, which is pretty common for such an old car, running such gross fuel. It runs biodiesel now, which actually cleans the tank quite a bit, but also contributed to the problem, since it loosens a bunch of the old diesel gunk up from the rest of the tank. But now that its clean, it won’t happen again.

This project took a grand total of 30 minutes, and I won’t ever get stuck on the highway again because I forgot to estimate how much gas was in my tank.

In case you’re interested, I made a tutorial on flickr to show how.